China Unicom’s mobile base continues to decline, but in September the telco reported its lowest rate of customer loss for some months.
China’s second largest mobile operator lost 287,000 mobile customers last month, down from more than half a million losses in August and a peak of 2.82 million in February. It last grew its customer base in January.
At the end of September it had 287.57 million mobile customers, down from 299 million at the start of 2015.
172.46 million of the total were 3G and 4G customers, up from 149 million at the beginning of the year. The telco is able to offer full 4G services, having been granted its FDD LTE licence earlier this year, but does not split out its 4G customer numbers.
By contrast, major rival China Mobile, which was able to launch 4G in late 2013, had 247.62 million 4G customers at the end of the third quarter. Its total mobile base of almost 823 million grew by more than 16 million over the first nine months of the year.
China Telecom will publish its results for the first three quarters next week.
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.
Its profit slipped by 22.6% to CNY8.18 billion (€1.1 billion).
The telco attributed the declines to last year’s VAT reform in China, something that has hit the country’s telcos’ numbers in the past few quarters.
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.
