China Mobile 2013 profit falls 5.9%

BEIJING - China Mobile Ltd, the world's largest mobile carrier by subscribers, will spend more this year to bolster its 4G mobile network to counter its first annual profit drop in 14 years.

The company blamed pressure from messaging services like the WeChat mobile app from Tencent Holdings Ltd and said on Thursday it will increase capital spending by 22 percent to 225.2 billion yuan ($36.34 billion) to expand the high-speed 4G service it launched in December.

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China Mobile also said it plans to sell 100 million 4G smartphones and tablets this year following the January launch of Apple Inc's iPhone on its network.

Costly subsidies, particularly for the iPhone, and the plan to raise capital spending, combined with a proposed value-added tax for China's carriers, could all weigh heavily on China Mobile's future profits as it tries to reinvent itself in the mobile Internet era.

China Mobile is betting however that subscribers will use larger amounts of data as more people connect using applications like WeChat that are carried on a user's data plan to avoid the SMS charges that were formerly lucrative sources of revenue for mobile carriers.

For all of 2013, China Mobile's net profit fell to 121.8 billion yuan, the first drop since 1999, compared with a 125 billion yuan SmartEstimate of 31 analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Operating revenue last year rose 8.3 percent to 630.2 billion yuan.

China Mobile's profit also fell to 30.3 billion yuan in the quarter ended December, as operating revenue growth slowed to 5.3 percent, hitting 167.2 billion yuan from a peak growth rate of 14.5 percent just six months earlier.

While revenue from data services in 2013 rose 24 percent to 206.9 billion yuan, voice revenue, which accounts for the majority of sales, shrank 3.4 percent to 355.7 billion yuan.

Compounding China Mobile's waning fortunes was a 6.5 percent drop in revenue from SMS text and MMS multimedia messages to 41.3 billion yuan in 2013.

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