China Telecom lifted its net profit for the first quarter of the year by 4.5% year-on-year, driven by a strong growth in 4G subscribers.
The operator reported a net profit of 5.35 billion yuan, on the back of a 5.8% increase in operating revenues to 91.43 billion yuan. Service revenues grew 7.5% year-on-year to 82.09 billion yuan.
China Telecom's 4G subscriber base grew by nearly 15.8 million to 138 million, with its total mobile customer base increasing by 6.5 million to 222 million.
Total 4G data traffic grew 115% to represent a monthly average per 4G user of 1.27GB. But mobile voice minutes of use declined to 179.56 billion minutes, from 186.52 billion during the previous quarter.
On the wireline front, China Telecom added 2.7 million broadband customers, reaching 126 million. FTTH subscribers represented 112 million of this – a net addition of nearly 6.1 million.
Operating expenses grew 5.8%, with network operations and support expenses up 12.9% due to ongoing network expansion and tower asset costs.
“Facing the increasingly intensified market competition, the Group increased efforts in 'New Convergence' development and firmly seized the terminal benefits from '6-mode multi-mode' to optimize the data traffic operation strategies and persistently accelerate users to upgrade their service from 3G to 4G , resulting in remarkable enhancement in scale and values of mobile business,” the company said in its first quarter report.