China Unicom announced its annual performance of 2015 on March 16th. At the press conference of annual performance after that, Wang Xiaochu, chairman of China Unicom, positively responded on the rumor of the merger of China Unicom and China Telecom, saying that he hasn't received any message of the merger from China's telecom regulator. Meanwhile, these two major operators and the regulator didn't discuss the merger.
For the deep cooperation between China Unicom and China Telecom in 2015, Wang Xiaochu said that the two companies have cooperated on the basis of sharing resources and competed with each other in business with the same business pattern as some international companies. Wang pointed out that the two companies have cooperated during the first two months this year, sharing 10 thousand base stations, of which 5000 serve for city towers. The two sides are looking to more opportunities for cooperation.
He also expressed that it is the most difficult time for China Unicom. The Chinese government released several policies last year, including "replacing the business tax with a value-added tax", "data traffic not cleared" and "improving the speed and cutting down the tariff", making the profitability reduce by 20-30%. The mobile business of China Unicom has reduced for seventeen consecutive months and hasn't achieved lower cost but brought pressure on profitability.
The current target of China Unicom is to stop the loss of subscribers and control its capital expenditure by improving 4G coverage through the cooperation with others. The revenue of mobile services of China Unicom has stabilized in February 2016, but there is still a year before we see the profitability improvements.