China Mobile has a new CEO – Li Yue. He supersedes Wang Jianzhou, who stepped down after almost six years at the helm. Mr Jianzhou will remain as executive director and chairman.
In addition to the change in management, China Mobile also unveiled some cool figures. Here’s what we find to be most interesting:
- H1 2010 profit is up 4.2% year-on-year to 57.6 billion CNY ($8.4 billion), while revenues increased 7.9% (to 229.8 billion CNY).
- Total subscribers hit 554 million following net additions of 31.76 million.
- TD-SCDMA network rollout goes as planned – the carrier had 115,000 base stations deployed across 238 cities by the end of June. The plan is to have 200,000 base stations installed by the end of the year, providing “basic coverage for all county level and above cities.”
- There were 10.46 million 3G customers by the end of June, representing 1.89% of the total subscriber base. The growth came thanks to the “significant increase” in the number of TD-SCDMA handsets available (now 210).
- ARPU decreased to 72 CNY during H1 2010, but revenue from value-added services increased 13.4%, contributing 29.5% (67.9 billion CNY) to overall operating revenue. China Mobile had 2.7 million users of its mobile payment/wallet service, 6 million paying users of its mobile reading service, over 3.2 million paying users for its music download service and about 300,000 users of the CMMB-based mobile TV service.
Finally, in terms of China Mobile’s LTE plans, the carrier said it plans “multiple city field tests after the successful network demonstration at Shanghai World Expo” and expects “most manufacturers” to launch their first TD-LTE chipsets in the first half of next year. We’ll definitely keep watching what the world’s largest mobile operator in terms of subscriber numbers is doing and keep you folks in the loop…
[Via: MobileBusinessBriefing]