Telecommunications network operator China Unicom’s profit down 22.5 per cent

In contrast, its smaller rival China Telecom, which also received its full FDD-LTE licences during Q1 2015, focused on building dense 4G coverage in urban areas, where more affluent customers and early adopters are likely to be found. Unicom’s weaker 4G coverage resulted in valuable high-speed customers migrating to Telecom as well as China Mobile.

China Unicom generated revenues of 211.9 billion yuan (€29.5 billion), in the first nine months of the year, down by 1.6% on the same period in 2014, while service revenue dropped by 3.8% to CNY179.8 billion.

Mobile subscribers came to 287.6M, a net loss of 287,000 subs; of those, 172.5M were mobile broadband subscribers, up 4.8M. Zacks raised shares of China Unicom (Hong Kong) Limited from a sell rating to a hold rating in a report on Friday, August 14th. Mobile service revenues fell to CNY 109.5 billion from CNY 119.1 billion a year ago, while fixed service revenues increased to CNY 69.2 billion from CNY 66.9 billion.

The company has been struggling to retain users, with its total number of mobile subscribers falling 3.2 percent by the end of September from a year earlier to 287.6 million.

That compares with average monthly growth of 19.3 million 4G customers at China Mobile in the third quarter.

The same trend was reflected in the results reported by Unicom for the first nine months of the year. Check out our dedicated 4G LTE content channel here on Light Reading.

Like China Mobile earlier this week, China Unicom said a recently-announced mobile data carry over policy will have an impact on its figures in Q4.

China’s three state-owned telecom operators have turned to “4G+” mobile services, a fourth-generation (4G) wireless service that offers faster connections, in a bid to lure subscribers, according to tech blog Guancha01.

Shares in China Mobile and China Unicom fell by around 3% in Hong Kong today due to concern about a slowdown in the Chinese economy.