Beijing, July 22 (Reporter Xin Huang learned from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology today that in the first half of the year, China’s telecom business revenue totaled 692.7 billion yuan, up 3.2% year-on-year, and the growth rate was 1.4 percentage points higher than that in the first quarter.
It is worth noting that in the first half of the year, the cumulative traffic of mobile Internet reached 74.5 billion GB, a year-on-year increase of 34.5%; Among them, the mobile Internet traffic reached 72 billion GB, up 30.4% year-on-year, accounting for 96.6% of the total mobile Internet traffic. In June, the average mobile Internet access traffic per household reached 10.14GB/ household, up 29.3% year-on-year, and 1.55GB/ household higher than that in December last year.
In particular, the growth rate of mobile Internet access traffic in the western region is leading. In the first half of the year, the mobile Internet access traffic in the eastern, central, western and northeastern regions reached 31.3 billion, 16.3 billion, 22.7 billion and 4.2 billion GB respectively, up by 29.5%, 36.5%, 41.8% and 28.4% year-on-year, and the growth rate in the western region was ahead of the whole country. Among them, in June, the average mobile Internet access traffic (DOU) of 16 provinces in China was higher than the average level, and the DOU values of Tibet, Yunnan and Guizhou were in the top three, reaching 15.95GB/ household, 15.06GB/ household and 14.81GB/ household; The difference between the highest and lowest DOU values in each province is 9.15GB/ household, which is 3.27GB/ household higher than the same period of last year.
Li Zhen, an industrial research analyst at the Innovation Research Institute of Peking University Science Park, said in an interview with the Economic Daily that the rapid increase in mobile Internet traffic in the first half of the year was due to the following reasons: First, the gradual use of 5G and the increasing popularity of 5G smartphones provided higher quality content, which correspondingly boosted the increase in mobile Internet traffic; Second, the speed-up and fee reduction are deepening, and operators have brought users a higher quality mobile traffic experience, which makes users prefer mobile networks in the process of use; Third, the epidemic caused all parties to participate in the construction, and operators actively carried out remote live broadcast and 5G network laying, which boosted the usage of mobile Internet traffic. Therefore, mobile Internet traffic showed a rising trend.
Correspondingly, in the first half of the year, it was data and Internet business income that supported the steady growth of telecom business income. In the first half of the year, the fixed and mobile data and Internet business revenues of the three basic telecom enterprises were 115.7 billion yuan and 318.5 billion yuan, respectively, up by 7.6% and 3.2% year-on-year, accounting for 16.7% and 46% respectively, up by 0.7 and 0.1 percentage points year-on-year, driving the telecom business revenue to increase by 1.2 and 1.5 percentage points, which is the main pillar of the steady growth of telecom business revenue.
"The accelerated growth of fixed value-added and other income is the first driving force for the growth of telecom business income." Li Zhen said.
In the first half of the year, three basic telecom enterprises actively developed emerging services such as IPTV, Internet data center, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and achieved a total revenue of 90.3 billion yuan in fixed value-added services, up 23.5% year-on-year, with a growth rate of 4.6 percentage points higher than that in the first quarter, accounting for 13% of the telecom business revenue, accounting for 1.7 percentage points higher than that in the same period last year, which boosted the telecom business revenue growth by 2.6 percentage points.
This can also be seen from the classification of mobile phone users. According to statistics, by the end of June, the three basic telecommunications companies had developed 1.106 billion cellular Internet of Things end users, up 32.7% year-on-year, with a net increase of 78.12 million over the end of last year, among which the end users used in intelligent manufacturing, intelligent transportation and intelligent public utilities accounted for 21.1%, 18.2% and 21.4% respectively. The total number of IPTV users reached 304 million, a year-on-year increase of 7.9%. The number of mobile Internet users reached 1.32 billion, and the penetration rate of mobile phone users was 82.8%, up 0.6 percentage points from the end of last year.
At the same time, the revenue of fixed communication business grew steadily, and the decline of mobile communication business revenue continued to narrow. In the first half of the year, three basic telecom enterprises realized fixed communication business income of 236.3 billion yuan, up 12% year-on-year, and the growth rate increased by 2.2 percentage points compared with the same period of last year and the first quarter, accounting for 34.1% of telecom business income; The revenue of mobile communication business was 456.4 billion yuan, down 0.9% year-on-year, and the decline rate was 3.1 and 1 percentage point lower than that of the same period of last year and the first quarter respectively, accounting for 65.9% of the telecom business revenue.
The data also shows that as of the end of June, the total number of mobile phone users of the three basic telecommunications companies reached 1.595 billion, a year-on-year increase of 0.6%. Among them, the number of 4G users was 1.283 billion, up 4.2% year-on-year, accounting for 80.4% of the total number of mobile phone users, up 0.2 percentage points from the first quarter.
At present, China’s fixed broadband access users are migrating at a high rate, and the proportion of 100-megabit access users is gradually increasing. By the end of June, the total number of fixed Internet broadband access users of the three basic telecommunications enterprises reached 465 million, up 7% year-on-year, with a net increase of 15.73 million over the end of last year. Among them, there are 434 million optical fiber access users, accounting for 93.2% of the total fixed Internet broadband access users. There are 404 million fixed Internet broadband access users with access rates of 100Mbps and above, accounting for 86.8% of the total number of users, accounting for an increase of 1.5 percentage points over the first quarter; With the accelerated promotion of gigabit broadband services, there are 2.67 million fixed Internet broadband access users with access rates of 1000Mbps and above, a net increase of 1.8 million over the end of last year.