Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) aims to boost its 5G penetration rate by 10 percentage points to about 35 percent this year, amid demand from government agencies and enterprise clients for high-speed Internet connections and private networks, the company said yesterday.
Chunghwa, the nation’s biggest telecom, had accumulated 2.45 million 5G subscribers as of the end of last year, accounting for about 25 percent of its overall mobile users, data compiled by the National Communications Commission showed.
“We expect 5G subscription to grow at a similar pace as last year,” Chunghwa Telecom chairman Sheih Chi-mau (謝繼茂) told a news conference in Taipei.
Photo: CNA
Chunghwa Telecom said that government agencies and industrial users are the early adopters of 5G networks, followed by individual subscribers, which is starkly different from the uptake of 4G.
It has made good progress in helping enterprise clients build private 5G networks, obtaining 90 percent of the deals among the nation’s large-scale enterprises, it said.
Local telecoms would likely be disciplined on pricing strategy, as it would take longer to break even on 5G services compared with 4G, given the heavy infrastructure deployment and investment, Sheih said.
The companies spent 10 years making 4G services a profitable business, he said.
To stimulate 5G adoption and to satisfy demand for emerging applications, Chunghwa Telecom said it plans to add 1,700 workers this year, with 41 percent of the initial hires focused on artificial intelligence, cloud services, cybersecurity and data services.
To attract and retain talent, it is raising the starting salary for entry-level jobs to NT$40,000 (US$1,324), from about NT$37,000, it said.
Increases in human resource expenses are to eliminate about NT$0.05 from the company’s earnings per share a year, it said.
The company also set a mid-term goal of boosting revenue from three rapidly growing businesses — cloud-based services, cybersecurity and 5G-based artificial intelligence of things — to reach NT$10 billion each by 2025.
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