China Mobile held the shareholder meeting for 2015 on May 26th. Li Yue, CEO of China Mobile said that the SMS volume is declining rapidly due to the growing popularity of OTT services and SMS will be weeded out with the launch of 5G.
Therefore, China Mobile will combine SMS and RCS to form future Internet message services. China Mobile is known to launch RCS in the second half of this year.
Li Yue also pointed out that China Mobile will conduct internal 5G test in 2016, 5G field test will be conducted in 2017, and the operator is estimated to launch 5G services in 2020. Xue Taohai, deputy general manager and CFO of China Mobile said, 5G capital expenditure of China Mobile is near zero now beacause the operator is mainly cooperating with other industry partners in 5G research and portion of 5G capital expenditure will remain relatively small in 2017 and 2018.
Li Yue said China Mobile will continue to show a deterioration in net profit margin and unit profitability in 5G era and it will ensure profit with expanded service scale resulting from research and development.