China Unicom released the financial results in 2016 on March 15. Facing severe challenges of market competition, the company, in 2016, has promoted the implementation of cooperation and innovation strategies, made up for its deficiencies, stopped the service revenue drop and raised 4G competitiveness.
In 2016, the service revenue of China Unicom stabilized, increasing 2.4 percent to 240.98 billion renminbi, and the company generated 79.5 billion renminbi in EBITDA with a 9.1 percent year-on-year decline, accounting for 33 percent of the service revenue.
China Unicom has strengthened precision investment, driven the cooperation and resource sharing within and outside the industry during the period. With largely raised network capability, the company's capital expenditure sharply dropped to CNY72.11 billion, marking a 46.1 percent decline over 2015.
Benefiting from both above, its free cash flow totaling 2.48 billion renminbi got positive.
Mobile and 4G services
Compared with the same period of 2015, its mobile services increased 1.7 percent to CNY145.02 billion; mobile subscribers with expenditure grew 11.51 million to 263.82 million, of which the ARPU rose steadily to CNY46.4.
China Unicom took its 4G user base to 104.55 million with 60.4 million net adds, and the average monthly 4G data traffic per user came to 1,521MB.
The company added 337,000 4G base stations in the whole year of which the total hit 736,000, and achieved 4G network coverage in key areas with network rate and signal quality comparable to the industry level.
Fixed broadband services
Fixed broadband services brought revenue of CNY 94.66 billion, a 3.7 percent increase year-over-year; IDC and cloud computing services earned the company CNY 9.45 billion, rising 33.7 percent; ICT service revenue jumped 37 percent to CNY 5.94 billion.
Depending on high-bandwidth products and video application, China Unicom upgraded and integrated user consumption, as a response to the fierce competition in broadband. Its fixed broadband access revenue reached CNY43.87 billion in 2016 and fixed broadband user increased 4 percent to 75.24 million, of which 71.2 percent were FTTH users.
The connection-based basic services have been the main source of the revenue for the operators in China still, while traditional communication users have been already saturated, voice business has been falling, and traffic data has been in huge demand.