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China Telecom added more customers than its larger rival in December, but Unicom’s base continues to fall.
China Mobile on Wednesday published new customer numbers that show its 4G base is now well in excess of 300 million.
The world’s biggest mobile operator ended 2015 with 312.28 million 4G connections, having posted record net additions in December.
The telco added 24.96 million 4G customers last month alone, its best result since launching its TD-LTE service in late 2013.
Its overall customer base it not expanding at the same rate though.
China Mobile had 826.24 million mobile subscriptions at end-2015, up from 825.19 million a month earlier and 806.63 million at the end of 2014.
Those 1.05 million net adds in December mean China Mobile is now lagging behind smaller rival China Telecom, in terms of new customers at least.
China Telecom added 1.33 million mobile customers last month, but with an overall base of 197.90 million, it remains a long way behind the market leader. It had 58.46 million 4G customers at the end of the year, having added the bulk of those – 51.38 million – during the course of the 12 months.
The country’s third player, China Unicom, is still seeing its customer base contract though.
China Unicom lost 262,000 mobile customers in December, reducing its base to 286.66 million. It lost 12.44 million customers during the course of the year, having last recorded monthly growth in January 2015. It does not split out 4G customers, but said its combined 3G and 4G customer base grew by 3.61 million last month to 183.85 million.
Earlier this month China Telecom and China Unicom brokered a partnership deal that will see them work together to accelerate shared infrastructure deployment to improve mobile coverage and performance. They will also help to restore one another’s services should they suffer outages caused by natural disasters and major emergencies.
