China Tower, the infrastructure joint venture of China's three operators, has reported an 8% year-on-year increase in net profit for the first half of 2018 to 4.76 billion yuan ($686.4 million).
But the result disappointed the market, which sent China Tower's stock price below its recent IPO pricing of HK$1.26. As of close of trading on trading on Wednesday, China Tower shares had fallen 3.15% to HK$1.23.
Revenue for the quarter grew 6.2% year-on-year to 35.33 billion yuan, with revenue from the company's core power business growing 3.8% to 34.06 billion yuan.
Meanwhile distributed antenna system revenue nearly doubled to 824 million yuan and revenue from trans-sector site application and information business increased from 22 million yuan to 374 million yuan.
“As the world’s largest telecommunications tower infrastructure service provider, we continued to reinforce our commanding industry leadership in China and proactively expanded our business lines to diversify our revenue streams,” China Tower chairman Tong Jilu said in a statement [PDF].
“With the ongoing support of the government at all levels, as well as related sectors, we continued to implement our strategy of transforming public utility towers and poles into telecommunications towers. By doing so, we were able to include public resources such as utility poles, lamp poles and surveillance poles as we expanded our site resources.”
He noted that as of the end of June, 71% of new leases from China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom were on a co-location basis.