Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation’s largest telecoms company, yesterday said it was considering raising capital spending this year to fund the construction of a new cloud computing data center.
To cope with the construction, the company’s capital spending could exceed its target of 15 percent of its annual revenue, president Chang Shaio-tung (張曉東) told investors yesterday.
The company would evaluate the possibility of increasing this year’s capital spending by 10 percent from the NT$32.6 billion (US$1.02 billion) originally estimated.
Chunghwa Telecom plans to build its second cloud computing data center in Changhua County. That would bring the company’s investment in cloud computing data centers to NT$59 billion.
Yesterday, the company said second-quarter net income rose 12.63 percent to NT$12.93 billion on the back of a reduced tax rate, compared with NT$11.48 billion last year.
Operating profit, however, slid 0.1 percent year-on-year to NT$14.91 billion. Margin on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization declined to 47.33 percent in the second quarter, from 50.05 percent a year ago.
In the first six months, Chunghwa Telecom made NT$24.99 billion in net profit, up 12.3 percent from NT$22.26 billion during the same period last year. Revenue rose 2.2 percent year-on-year to NT$99.28 billion from NT$97.18 billion.
The telecoms company expected net profit to drop 8.4 percent, mostly because of a 5.87 percent annual price cut requested by the National Communications Commission. The new price tariffs took effect in April.
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