The world’s largest mobile operator, China Mobile (CHL), continued to pile on the subscribers during the third quarter, adding 16.73 million net customers to its network and ending the period with 633.52 million total customers on its network. The carrier noted that nearly half of its Q3 net additions were to its TD-SCDMA-based 3G service, which ended the quarter with 43.16 million total customers.
Overall voice traffic across its network increased significantly during the quarter to match its growing customer base, but average usage actually dropped slightly 526 minutes per user, per month. Non-voice services surged with total data traffic across its network increasing from 137.1 billon megabytes at the end of Q2 to 217.3 billion MB at the end of Q3. China Mobile noted that while traffic across both its wide-area and local-area wireless networks witnessed considerable growth, its cellular-based wide area network posted a greater percentage increase.
Fiscally, China Mobile reported that average revenue per user remained stable sequentially at around $11 per month. Total revenues increased 8.8% year-over-year for the first nine months to $60.1 billion this year, though earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization margins dipped from 50.4% in 2010 to 48.8% this year.
A similar result was seen in profits for shareholders, which increased 5.4% year-over-year to $14.4 billion, while profit margins dropped from 24.7% in 2010 to 24% this year.
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