Chunghwa Telecom, the incumbent operator in Taiwan, added 192,000 new HiNet subscribers over the last twelve months to bring the total number of Internet subscriptions to 4.30 million at the end of December 2006. The number of broadband subscribers, including ADSL and FTTB subscribers, increased to 4.04 million at the end of December 2006. A total of 197,000 new ADSL subscribers and 165,000 new FTTB subscribers were added during the year.
Chunghwa added 150,000 Multimedia On Demand (MOD) subscribers in fiscal 2006, which brought the total to 249,000. Chunghwa's MOD is an IPTV service that offers a wide range of video-on-demand, near VOD (NVOD), karaoke-on-demand and linear broadcast channels.
Some other trends for 2006:
- Chunghwa's data business continued to grow, and was up 6.6% primarily due to increased leased line revenue and the contribution from Chief Telecom recognized in the fourth quarter of 2006.
- At the end of December 2006, Chunghwa had 8.49 million mobile subscribers, up 4.0% from the previous year. Chunghwa remained the leading mobile operator in Taiwan for 2006, both in terms of 2G revenue and 2G subscriber market share, with 35.7% and 40.9% respectively. Chunghwa added 646,000 3G subscribers in fiscal 2006, which brought the
total to 943,000. At the end of year 2006, 3G ARPU was 31% higher than that of 2G. - At the end of 2006, the number of fixed-line subscribers totaled 13.12 million, slightly down by 1.0% compared to 2005. The company's market shares for local, DLD and ILD remained flat through 2006.
- Total revenues for fiscal year 2006 grew year-over-year by 0.9% to NT$186.34 billion, of which 33.8% was from fixed-line services, 39.2% was from mobile services and 24.9% was from Internet and data services.
- Mobile revenue remained flat in 2006. Declining fixed-to-mobile traffic, tariff reductions for mobile-to-fixed calls, and an increased amount of promotional packages were offset by 3.4% increase in usage minutes and 30% revenue growth from mobile VAS.
- Fixed-line revenues declined by 5.0%, the result of a 4.3% local revenue decrease due to mobile and broadband substitution, a 9.7% domestic long distance revenue decrease due to mobile substitution and VoIP, as well as an International long distance revenue decline of 3.7% from the impact of increasing wholesale minutes compared to total ILD minutes on unit price.
