Recently, MIIT issued the communication industry economic operation performance in September, the mobile voice calls has kept negative growth for 9 consecutive months while the mobile Internet data traffic achieved doubled growth for 9 consecutive months. An industry insider said that due to the impact of Internet social channels, the consumers’ dependence on the voice calls and SMS gradually declined and this caused certain impacts on the operators.
Data shows that the volume of mobile voice calls continued to decline and growth rate of domestic roaming calls continued to fall. During January to September, the nationwide mobile voice calls reached 2.14185 trillion minutes, which declined by 2.6% and the decreasing degree was equal to that of January to August; the growth trends of mobile voice calls and mobile phone users continued to reverse, although the number of mobile phone users still kept slight growth, the mobile voice calls have maintained negative growth for 9 consecutive months.
In addition, the mobile SMS business synchronously declined. During January to September, the nationwide mobile SMS business volume was 532.58 billion with a decline of 7% compared to the same time of last year.
The contrast performance is the consumption of data traffic. In September, the mobile Internet access data traffic reached 390 million GB and set a new highest record; the accumulative data traffic consumption reached 2.79 billion GB during January to September with an increase of 99.4% compared to the same time of last year; the average mobile Internet access traffic per user per month reached 350.5MB with an increase of 88.0%. Mobile phone Internet data traffic reached 2.50 billion GB, which achieved doubled growth for nine consecutive months.
Industry insiders pointed out that with the increase of social software and popularity of 4G networks, consumers’ dependence on the mobile phone voice calls and SMS is becoming weaker and weaker, the first impact is the gradually decline of data traffic tariff, the users can avoid the high communication costs through the use of social software to communicate with each other; in addition, social software often have more functions, including video, facial expressions, pictures, voice, file transfer, sharing of life and others, which are more conform with the consumers’ needs.
In addition, industry insiders said that the user groups of social software are spreading to the elder people, not only young people are keen to use these tools, but more and more middle-aged and old people also begin to try new features, which causes impacts on the traditional communications industry in a greater degree.
The 2015 interim performance reports show that only China Mobile achieved revenue growth in the first half of this year, which was CNY 340.7 billion with an increase of 4.9%, however, its net profit fell by 0.8% than the same period of last year. China Telecom and China Unicom's revenues also fell slightly. It is worth noting that China Unicom lost more than 10 million subscribers in 1H2015.