In this indicator, China Telecom has led for six consecutive years
Written by IT Times reporter Qian Lifu
Edited by Qian Lifu and Sun Yan
Recently, the 2023 "report cards" of various localities and industries have been released.
2023 is still a good year for the ICT industry. At the press conference of the State Council Information Office held a few days ago, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology disclosed that China's telecommunications business revenue will increase by 6% year-on-year in 20232%, and the total volume of telecommunications business increased by 168%, which has become an important support for empowering economic growth. However, the decline in industry revenue and emerging business revenue growth also shows that the industry as a whole is still facing certain pressure.
Specific to the three operators, combined with the just-released operating data for December 2023, it can be said that each has its own bright spots. China Telecom unwittingly set a record, ranking first in the mobile subscriber incremental market for six consecutive years. China Mobile occupies the C position in the fixed-line broadband market, occupying the first place in both the total number of users and the scale of net increase.
Telecom revenue growth has consistently outperformed GDP
There are concerns about the decline in the growth rate of emerging business revenue
The development of China's telecommunications industry has been glorious beyond GDP growth, looking at the development data of China's information and communication industry since the reform and opening up, from 1978 to 2006, the annual business income of the communications industry has maintained double-digit growth and has been ahead of GDP growth.
However, since 2007, the growth rate of telecommunications revenue has been competing with GDP growth, and the two sides have won and lost each other. From the perspective of the decade from 2014 to 2023, the revenue growth of the telecom industry has been "more negative than good", and it has not outperformed GDP growth for seven years. But the good news is that in both 2022 and 2023, the growth rate of revenue in the telecom industry has exceeded GDP growth.
Specifically, in 2022, the revenue of telecom business will increase by 8% over the previous year, and the GDP growth rate will be 3% in the same year; In 2023, the revenue of telecommunications business increased by 62%, and the GDP growth rate in the same year was 52%。
In the past two years, the growth rate of telecom business revenue has outperformed GDP growth, and the biggest "contributor" is the emerging business sector.
Among the four major sectors that make up telecom business revenue, the mobile data traffic business, which was once the "strongest driving force", has performed relatively weakly in recent years, and its business revenue has evolved from "low growth" in 2022 to "slight decline" in 2023; Revenue in the voice segment continued to decline; The revenue of the fixed Internet broadband access business segment grew steadily; The performance of the emerging business revenue segment is very eye-catching, and it has become the main force driving the revenue of the telecom business, and its proportion in the revenue of the telecom business has been increasing.
However, at the same time, hidden worries have emerged, and compared with 2022, the growth rate of telecom business revenue and emerging business revenue in 2023 will decline significantly. In 2023, the revenue growth rate of the telecom industry will fall to 6 percent from 8% in the previous year2%, and the lead over GDP also fell to 1 percentage point from 5 percentage points in the previous year. In terms of emerging business revenue, the growth rate increased from 324% fell back to 191%, which is the lowest since 2018.
User growth breaks the "ceiling".
In the incremental market of mobile subscribers, telecommunications dominate
Many years ago, the argument that "the demographic dividend fades" and "user growth touches the 'ceiling'" has been widely circulated in the industry and has been recognized by many people. However, judging from the performance in 2023, whether it is the growth scale of mobile users or the growth scale of fixed-line broadband users, the conclusion of the "ceiling" has not been fulfilled.
In 2023, there will be a net increase of 43.15 million mobile users in China, exceeding the average level of the past five years (32.1 million households), driven by this, the penetration rate of mobile users in China will continue to increase rapidly, reaching 1225 100 people, higher than the global average (107 100 people) 15In 5 points, especially in Shanghai and Beijing, the mobile** penetration rate is more than 180 units and 100 people.
In 2023, there will be a net increase of 46.66 million fixed Internet broadband access users in China, which is also higher than the average of 457860,000 households per year), and the household broadband penetration rate reached 1102 per 100 households, compared to the global average (87.).1 100 households) is 231 point.
While the overall user scale has maintained a rapid growth trend, the rapid growth of 5G users and gigabit users is particularly eye-catching. By the end of 2023, China's 5G users will reach 80.5 billion households, accounting for 46 percent of mobile users6%, which is 25 times; Gigabit broadband subscribers reached 16.3 billion households, accounting for 25 percent of the users with fixed broadband access7%。Driven by the rapid increase in the penetration rate of gigabit users, the average contracted bandwidth of households in China has reached 4565Mbps households, an increase of 88 from the end of the previous year9Mbps households.
In terms of operators, China Telecom has performed well in the mobile market, while China Mobile has continued to run fast in the fixed-line broadband market.
China Telecom has set a record of ranking first in the mobile subscriber incremental market for six consecutive years. In 2018, China Telecom achieved a counterattack, and its net increase in mobile subscribers surpassed China Mobile for the first time, becoming the operator with the largest increase in mobile subscribers. In the following years, China Telecom has always occupied a dominant position in the incremental mobile user market. Judging from the performance in 2023, China Telecom will have a net increase of 16.59 million mobile users throughout the year, exceeding the net increase of 15.99 million mobile users of China Mobile.
In terms of fixed-line broadband, China Mobile continued to perform strongly, with a net increase of 2,607 for the year80,000 users, with a total user scale of nearly 300 million. China Telecom added 9.26 million subscribers for the year, with a total subscriber base approaching 200 million.
The deployment of new infrastructure is moderate.
The computing power network has leaped forward in stages
In 2023, China has made remarkable achievements in the construction of "dual gigabit" networks, computing power networks, and AI infrastructure systems.
In 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued the Action Plan for the Coordinated Development of Dual-Gigabit Networks (2021-2023). At that time, the goal was to have gigabit fiber networks capable of covering 400 million households by the end of 2023, and the scale of 10G PON and above ports with gigabit network service capabilities exceeded 10 million. For now, the goal is very conservative. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, by the end of 2023, the number of 10G PON ports will reach 23.02 million, more than double the original target, and the capacity to cover more than 500 million households has been formed. As the other wing of the "dual gigabit" network, the coverage, breadth and depth of the 5G network also exceeded the target, and by the end of 2023, the number of 5G base stations in China reached 33770,000, far exceeding the annual mission target of 2.9 million.
At the same time, the computing power network has achieved a phased leap. By the end of 2023, the number of data center racks provided to the public by the three basic telecommunications companies reached 970,000, a net increase of 1520,000 units, a net increase of nearly twice that of the previous year, and the scale of public basic computing power that can be provided to the outside world exceeds 26eflops (trillion floating point operations per second). At the same time, the industry is also building an all-optical foundation for computing network integration and cloud-network integration, starting the construction of ultra-large-scale intelligent computing centers, continuously optimizing the computing power supply structure, and launching the construction of 400G all-optical inter-provincial backbone networks to promote the efficient interconnection of cloud and computing power networks.
At the same time, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also disclosed that at the same time, in 2023, the three basic telecommunications companies and China Tower will complete a total of 420.5 billion yuan in fixed asset investment, an increase of 03%。Since the commercial launch of 5G in 2019, the investment in the telecom industry has maintained positive growth for five consecutive years, with an annual investment scale of more than 400 billion yuan for four consecutive years, of which the cumulative investment in 5G has exceeded 730 billion yuan.