The Zhitong Finance App learned that Goldman Sachs released a research report saying that the preliminary results of China Telecom (00728) and China Unicom (00762) in 2023 are in line with expectations. Due to lower capital expenditure burdens and stable growth prospects, it is believed that several telecom companies are expected to further increase their dividend payout ratios in 2024-2025.

The bank expects that the dividend policy will become the focus of the market. According to previous data, China Mobile (00941) and China Telecom will increase their dividend payout ratio to 70% or more in 2023, while China Unicom will increase the dividend payout ratio by 4 percentage points to 54%. Goldman Sachs believes that telecom companies have the ability and motivation to increase dividend payout ratios, and that the dividend payout ratio may gradually increase in 2024-2025.

Additionally, Goldman Sachs's 2024 cloud revenue growth rate for the three major telecom companies was 20% to 25%. In terms of AI opportunities, since 2023, all three telecom companies have launched large-scale language models (LLMs) focused on government or administrative applications. Among them, China Telecom purchased about 4,200 AI servers in 2023, and is expected to continue purchasing. In 2022, telecom companies' AI-related revenue base is low, and the growth potential over the next 2 to 3 years may have a significant impact on their cloud business.