China Unicom released its 2017 annual results on March 15th. In 2017, China Unicom achieved service revenue of CNY 249.02 billion with a year-on-year increase of 7.5%; the net profit reached CNY 2.38 billion and profit attributable to equity shareholders of the company increased by 176.4% year-on-year to CNY 430 million.
At the performance communication meeting, Wang Xiaochu, chairman of China Unicom, said that the company would continue to focus on efficiency in building networks and the annual expenditure was expected to not exceed CNY 50 billion in 2018. According to him, about 37% of the capital will be spent on mobile business, 20% will be on fixed-line network and the rest will be on IT and other fields. That is to say, China Unicom will spend CNY 18.5 billion on mobile business and 10 billion on fixed-line network in 2018.
According to the report, China Unicom's annual capital expenditure was CNY 42.1 billion in 2017, which was mainly used in key regions, 4G and broadband business. It built 110,000 new 4G base stations and the total number reached 850,000. The penetration rate of FTTH ports in fixed-line broadband reached 79.2%. Although capital expenditure has decreased significantly compared with 2016, the network utilization rate and NPS value have improved; the utilization rate of 4G network increased by 57% and the proportion of FDDS broadband users reached 77%, marking a significant increase of network resource utilization efficiency.
Lu Yimin, general manager of China Unicom, told the media that China Unicom will continue to take efficiency as the core and put its emphasis on key cities and regions, the company will achieve accurate expansion through big data, while the broadband service will gradually realize Gigabit network access. In addition, China Unicom will actively adopt new technologies to improve network intelligence level and increase innovative investments.