Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大) expects mobile revenue to remain flat over the next two years as it seeks to bolster its presence in the enterprise sector to counter the effect of escalating subscriber-price wars.
On the commercial side, cut-throat competition continues to lower telecom service tariffs, which will reduce average revenue per user (ARPU) and cut into the company’s top line, Taiwan Mobile president James Cheng (鄭俊卿) told an investor teleconference on Monday.
However, the firm has also found that most of the lower-rate plan subscribers sign their service contracts through online stores or social media partners, not in brick-and-mortar stores, he said.
That has meant a reduction in operating costs as Taiwan Mobile does not pay handset subsidies and dealer’s commissions for those subscribers, Cheng said.
“So in terms of bottom line, it [lower price rate] will not have as significant an impact,” Cheng said.
The nation’s No. 2 telecom said it would stop offering a NT$499 rate plan for unlimited 4G Internet access as of yesterday.
Its bigger rival, Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), yesterday also scrapped its controversial NT$499 rate plan that had offered unlimited Internet connection for civil servants, teachers and military personnel, although it is launching new plans with a monthly minimum of NT$469 and NT$599 for those same clients that offer unlimited connections, but at a slower speed.
Taiwan Mobile is working to improve its position in the enterprise and government sectors for its landline services, Cheng said.
“We have started to penetrate those two markets. We have landed a government tender to offer an artificial intelligence platform with our strategic partners,” he said.
The service contract is worth NT$1.1 billion (US$37.16 million), Cheng said.
“Hopefully, that will boost our telecom revenue and compensate a bit for [weakness in] mobile revenue,” he said.
“Mobile revenue, from what I see, for next two years, probably will remain flat in terms of the top line,” he said.
Telecom revenue of NT$18.47 billion for the first three months of the year was a 6 percent drop from the same period last year, while total revenue rose 5 percent to NT$30.31 billion from NT$28.84 billion, boosted by growth in TV shopping and cable TV businesses.
Net profit shrank 12 percent annually to NT$3.48 billion from NT$3.96 billion, 13 percent more than the company’s earnings forecast for the quarter of NT$3.07 billion.
Earnings per share fell to NT$1.28 from NT$1.46 the same period last year, while blended ARPU fell 4 percent annually to NT$691 from NT$720.
The board of directors approved a proposal to distribute a cash dividend of NT$5.6 per common share by allocating some of the firm’s capital surplus. That brought the payout ratio to 107 percent as the firm earned NT$5.21 per share last year.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS