Taiwan'ss Chunghwa Migrates 55% of Broadband Users to FTTx

Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom saw its Q1 consolidated revenue increase by 5.6% to NT$55.4 billion over a year ago, although net income fell 20% to NT$9.5 billion.

Dr. Shyue-Ching Lu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, "We began 2012 with a solid market leadership for all of our major business segments. For the first quarter, our growth was driven primarily by mobile business such as value-added services, increase of mobile internet subscribers, and innovative mobile service marketing. In addition, our MOD/IPTV is also gaining traction due to both increased ARPU and market share. We have executed well against the interim set-backs from the various business and regulatory environment.

Some highlights:

Mobile communications revenue increased by 12.0% to NT$25.6 billion; mobile value-added services (VAS) revenue increased by 29.2% to NT$4.6 billion.

Internet revenue increased by 1.7% to NT$6.2 billion; internet VAS revenue increased by 1.6% to NT$0.6 billion.

Domestic fixed communications revenue decreased by 1.1% to NT$19.0 billion.

International fixed communications revenue decreased by 4.0% to NT$3.6 billion.

Total operating costs and expenses increased by 14.4% to NT$44.1 billion.

Q1 CAPEX amounted to NT$6.7 billion, representing a 52.9% year-over-year increase. Of the NT$6.7 billion capex figure, 49.8% was used for the domestic fixed communications business, 29.7% was for the mobile business, 11.9% was for the internet business, 7.2% was for the international fixed communications business, and the remainder was for other uses.


Broadband access revenue, including ADSL and Fiber to the x ("FTTx"), decreased by 9.2% year-over-year to NT$4.7 billion, primarily due to the Company's voluntary broadband tariff reductions, as well as the mandated the National Communication Committee ("NCC") tariff reduction.


As of the end of the first quarter 2012, FTTx subscribers had reached 2.5 million, accounting for 55.8% of total broadband users. The company is continuing to push for FTTx migration from ADSL.


HiNet broadband subscribers totaled 3.7 million at the end of March 2012, a year-over-year rise of 3.2%.
Mobile.


As of the end of March 2012, Chunghwa had 10.1 million mobile subscribers, an increase of 3.1% compared to 9.8 million a year ago.


As of the end of March 2012, Chunghwa had 1.8 million mobile internet subscribers compared to 1.5 million subscribers as of the end of 2011, demonstrating the strong growth momentum that the Company has achieved. As a result, Chunghwa enhanced its target number for mobile internet subscriber to 2.35 million by the end of 2012.


Chunghwa's Multimedia-on-demand (IPTV) service now has 1.1 million subscribers. MOD ARPU also increased significantly to NT$145 in the first quarter, representing a growth of 15.7% compared to the same period of 2011. http://www.cht.com.tw