China Mobile 5G era: Profits Q1 up 2.3%, prices flat, traffic +37%
Productivity at China Mobile increased 35-40% overall, confirming the trend at Verizon and AT&T. 37% more traffic was carried at flat ARPU (+0.9%.) Profit was up slightly, 2.3%, implying that overall productivity rose at roughly the rate of traffic growth. That's a very rough measure, of course, but it corresponds to numerous results from carriers around the world.
"5G Network Customers" were 92.76 million, compared to "5G Package Customers" of 189 million. Analysts around the world are cheering that we now have more than the very misleading "package customer" figure. 4G & 5G packages cost the same, so subscribers took "5G packages" even though they didn't have a 5G phone. Fortunately, MIIT releases monthly figures of phone sales, which I used for my figure of 5G subscribers in China.
Phone manufacturers shipped 27 million 5G phones in China in the month of March. The total 5G in 2021 should be over 300 million in China, about as much as the rest of the world combined.