Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) reported that net profit last month rose 3.3 percent year-on-year to NT$31.4 billion (US$1.01 billion), or earnings per share of NT$0.41, outpacing long-term champion Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大).
Net profit for the nation’s biggest telecom in the first six months of this year reached NT$16.92 billion, or earnings per share of NT$2.18.
Due to higher mobile device sales, increases in sales from enterprise and government projects, as well as growth in multimedia-on-demand (MOD) sales, revenue last month gained 0.3 percent year-on-year to NT$16.89 billion, Chunghwa said.
However, cumulative revenue in the first six months still contracted by 5.5 percent year-on-year to NT$101.44 billion, because mobile service sales fell, it said.
Taiwan Mobile reported net profits last month of NT$1.06 billion, or earnings per share of NT$0.38, as net profits in the first six months increased 2.29 percent year-on-year to NT$6.28 billion, slightly surpassing the company’s financial forecast.
“Operating profits from the telecom business have stabilized compared with the same period last year, while our cable TV business continued to grow,” chief financial officer Rosie Yu (俞若奚) said in a statement.
The company reported that revenue last month expanded 10 percent annually to NT$9.89 billion, causing total revenue to increase 1.1 percent to NT$59.49 billion in the January-to-June period.
Taiwan Mobile benefited last month from a sales promotion by Momo.com Inc (富邦媒) — the telecom’s TV and online retailing platform — which drove up annual growth of e-commerce sales by 38 percent, Yu said.
The company also saw stable growth from its core telecom services, thanks to growth in services for enterprise clients, such as cloud-based services, she said.
Meanwhile, net profit for Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (FET, 遠傳電信) last month came in at NT$705 million, down 15 percent from a year earlier, with earnings per share of NT$0.22, the firm said.
In the first six months, net profit reached NT$4.41 billion from NT$5.18 billion in the same period last year, while aggregate revenue over the period fell 4.71 percent to NT$41.25 billion.
The firm said that business involving cloud-based services, the Internet of Things, big data and digital content helped fuel revenue growth last month.
Market fundamentals for telecoms have not improved since the launch of unlimited monthly data plans for NT$499 in May last year, Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co (元大投顧) said in a note on Friday.
“We are still seeing the lingering effects of the NT$499 price war, as telecoms continue to release new promotions similar to the previous NT$499 offerings,” Yuanta analyst Amber Lee (李瑜芳) said.
Only limited deployment of 5G networks would likely be visible until at least 2021, Lee said.
The amortization that would follow the 5G spectrum auction in the second half of this year is likely to weigh on major players’ earnings outlook, she added.
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