① Last year, China Telecom achieved double growth in revenue and net profit, and its intelligent computing capabilities nearly tripled over the same period last year. ② Tianyi Cloud has a stable position as the number one global operator cloud, but it has failed to achieve the goal of 100 billion yuan in revenue. ③ The quantum aspect is a major business direction that has received the attention of China Telecom. The next step is to organically integrate supercomputing, computation, intelligent computing, and quantum computing to form a cloud multi-computing platform.
Financial Services Association, March 26 (Reporter Fu Jing) With the release of the China Telecom (601728.SH) annual report after today's market, the results of the three major telecom operators have all been released. China Telecom achieved double growth in revenue and net profit last year, and its intelligent computing capabilities increased nearly threefold over the previous year; Tianyi Cloud steadily ranked first as the global operator Cloud, but failed to achieve the goal of 100 billion yuan in revenue.
Chairman Ke Ruiwen said at the results conference today that China Telecom's goal for the next three years is to maintain good growth in service revenue, the net profit growth rate is higher than the revenue growth rate, and the ratio of capital expenditure to service revenue continues to decline.
According to financial data, the company achieved revenue of 507.843 billion yuan last year, an increase of 6.9% over the previous year; net profit to mother was 30.446 billion yuan, an increase of 10.3% over the previous year.
It is worth noting that China Telecom's net profit for Q3 last year was 6.948 billion yuan. Based on this calculation, Q4 net profit was 3.345 billion yuan, down 51.86% from the previous month. In fact, on a month-on-month basis, last year's Q3 net profit also fell by more than 40%. However, a source close to the operator told the Financial Federation reporter that general performance may change seasonally, so there is no need to pay too much attention to quarterly fluctuations.
Looking at specific business, its basic business revenue grew steadily last year, achieving mobile communication service revenue of 195.7 billion yuan, an increase of 2.4% year on year. Among them, mobile value-added and application revenue reached 25.8 billion yuan, up 12.4% year on year, the number of mobile users increased net by 16.59 million, and the number of users reached 408 million.
In terms of production volume business, revenue last year was 138.9 billion yuan, up 17.9% year on year, accounting for 29.9% of service revenue, up 2.8% year on year, and the incremental contribution to service revenue increased to 70.4%.
A CIFA reporter learned that China Telecom's strategy is to focus on the four major technological directions of cloud, network, artificial intelligence, and quantum/security, focusing on seven strategic emerging industries and future industries, including cloud computing and computing power, next-generation information and communication, big data, artificial intelligence, security, quantum, and digital platforms.
Among them, in terms of clouds, Tianyi Cloud has a stable position as the number one operator cloud in the world. However, according to financial data, Tianyi Cloud's revenue reached 97.2 billion yuan last year, an increase of 67.9% over the previous year, and failed to achieve the revenue target of 100 billion yuan.
According to the reporter's analysis, Tianyi Cloud's business revenue doubled in 2022, reaching 57.9 billion yuan, an increase of 107.5% over the previous year. At the beginning of last year, the company set a target for Tianyi Cloud's annual revenue target of 100 billion yuan. At last year's semi-annual results conference, Ke Ruiwen once again stated, “There is a lot of room for cloud business. China Telecom's cloud development is based on the advantages of cloud network integration. We have mastered self-developed full-stack technology and have more than 4,000 R&D talents. We will remain steadfast in achieving Tianyi Cloud's 100 billion revenue target during the year.” However, it is worth noting that the cloud business growth rate of the three major operators last year was generally lower than last year.
According to financial reports, the company added 8.1 EFLOPS for the full year of last year, reaching 11.0 EFLOPS, an increase of 279.3%. Nodes such as Beijing, Shanghai, Suguining, and Inner Mongolia already have more than kilocalories of training resources to accelerate the deployment of a new generation of large-scale intelligent computing clusters in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao regions. The Shanghai Single Chi Wan Ka Liquid-Cooled Intelligent Computing Center was put into operation this year; it added 1.0EFLOPS for the whole year, reaching 4.1 EFLOPS, an increase of 32.3%.
The quantum aspect is a major business direction that has received much attention from China Telecom. China Telecom Quantum Information Technology Group Co., Ltd. (“China Telecom Quantum Group”), a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Telecom, debuted at MWC2024, an event in the global communications field at the beginning of this year, which was particularly remarkable. On the evening of March 11, after 4 trading days of suspension, Guodian Quantum (688027.SH), currently the only A-share listed quantum technology company, made a big announcement. China Telecom Quantum Group plans to invest 1.9 billion yuan in strategic shares and become the new controlling shareholder.
At the performance conference, Ke Ruiwen also said that China Telecom Quantum Group “belongs to the group company below the company. It can be seen that we attach importance to it. The momentum in this area is quite good now.” According to it, the next step is to insist on open cooperation. The best integration point is to give full play to China Telecom's cloud network integration advantages, launch a quantum computing cloud platform, use quantum as a type of computing power to provide services to the community through public cloud methods, and organically integrate supercomputing, computation, intelligent computing, and quantum computing to form a cloud multi-computing platform.
At the same time, the reporter noticed that the company's capital expenditure last year was 98.8 billion yuan, of which 34.8 billion yuan was invested in mobile networks and 35.5 billion yuan was invested in industrial digitization. In 2022, China Telecom completed a total capital expenditure of 925 billion yuan, of which 31 billion yuan was invested in 5G and 27.1 billion yuan in industrial digitization. The “one rise and one drop” of investment in the two major sectors mentioned above is also in line with industry trends.
Furthermore, China Telecom and China Unicom (600050.SH) continue to deepen network co-construction and sharing, and are working together to build a 4G/5G shared network. The two sides have saved more than 340 billion yuan in investment and annual operating costs of more than RMB 39 billion. Last year, more than 220,000 5G base stations were built, the number of 4G medium frequency shared base stations exceeded 2 million, and the medium frequency sharing rate exceeded 90%. In terms of replanting 800 MHz, in August of last year, the company was approved to re-cultivate the 800 MHz frequency for 5G. As of January this year, 250,000 800 MHz base stations with 4G/5G integrated service capabilities have been built.
The board of directors of the company proposed a final dividend of 0.090 yuan (tax included) per share at the end of last year. The dividend of 0.1,432 yuan (tax included) was already distributed in the middle of last year, and the annual dividend was 0.2332 yuan (tax included). The total amount of dividends distributed throughout the year increased 19.0% year over year, exceeding 70% of the profit due to shareholders in the current year; profit distributed in cash gradually increased to more than 75% of the profit due to shareholders in that year.