MobileMonday Global

^{Combined revenue passes Nokia} Top four Chinese operators gross EUR 60 billion in 2006

China's four major carriers, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom and China Netcom (CNC) had in 2006 a total revenue of EUR 60 billion or 636 billion yuan and their net profits added up to EUR 10 billion or 107 billion yuan. The combined revenue is a bit more than Nokia's EUR 54 billion revenue in 2006.

According to a report by CCID Consulting China Mobile topped the four carriers. Its revenue surpassed the other three carriers by a large margin.

China Telecom and CNC, however, saw a reduction in their rate of revenue increase. The main reasons were that mobile service fees kept decreasing while traffic distribution of the fixed networks increased, resulting in less revenue from voice services.

Meanwhile, demand for broadband services increased rapidly and cancelled out some of the effects on the lines.

Both China Mobile and China Unicom boasted a remarkable increase of net profits in 2006. China Mobile was the top of the four; China Unicom had the greatest growth rate, whereas China Telecom and CNC saw some decrease in net profits. This indicates that mobile operators had further enhanced profitability while fixed networks operators witnessed continuously reduced profitability due to greater challenges to their main operations.

China Mobile had a net profit of EUR 6.3 billion, an increase of 23.3% over 2005.

China Unicom achieved a before-tax profit of EUR 0.8 billion, marking an increase of 29.4% over the previous year. Of the total before-tax profits, EUR 0.66 billion was achieved by GSM mobile phone services, while CDMA services achieved one hundred million euros. This was the first time CDMA operation made an annual profit.

China Telecom made a net profit of EUR 2.6 billion. CNC made a merged net profit of EUR 1 billion.

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