China Telecom, the smallest mobile operator in China, reported 10.2% gain on net profit, helped by strong mobile business growth.
Profit for the six months ending June 30 was 9.71 billion yuan ($1.5 billion), and revenue rose 11.7% to 120.1 billion yuan.
Mobile revenue rose 50.6% year-on-year to 37.8 billion yuan despite intensified competition from rivals China Mobile and China Unicom, while revenue from traditional fixed-line services declined 0.2% to 82.3 billion yuan from a year earlier.
China Telecom said its number of mobile subscribers jumped 19.7% over a year earlier to 108 million. The number of 3G subscribers rose to 21.54 million by end of June, after the company adding 9.25 million new 3G users during the first half year.
China Telecom chairman and CEO Wang Xiaochu said the company registered a record-high of 2.02 million new 3G users in July, bringing the total 3G subscriber number to 23.56 million. This figure outpaced China Unicom, which registered 1.87 million in the same month.
Wang attributed the strong uptake on its 3G service to the breakthrough in 3G smartphones. In the first half of the year, China Telecom launched 400 models of 3G handsets, of which 100 were smartphones with many priced at sub-1000 yuan smartphones, Wang noted.
This lifted the 3G mobile data usage by 78.3% from 834 TB in January to 1,487 TB in June. 3G APRU, meanwhile, was slightly over 80 yuan in the first half but Wang expected to ARPU is likely to decline in the rest of the year.
“We will tracking our competitors in pricing on voice but we would try to maintain our pricing for data because larger data traffic on 3G will help raise our APRU,“ Wang said.
Like rival China Mobile, China Telecom is also in talks with Apple to bring the EVDO iPhone to its network, as an attempt to get bigger share in the 3G market.
Despite rumors that China Telecom would launch the iPhone in October, Wang said the company “is in confidential agreement with Apple and couldn’t reveal anything yet as of now.”