Customer numbers fall at China Mobile

China Mobile (0941) said the total number of its mobile service users amounted to 961 million last month, a net decrease of 629,000.

The number of 5G package customers reached about 425 million in February, an net increase of 24.15 million month-on-month.

Meanwhile, China Telecom (0728) said its total number of mobile subscribers reached 376 million in February, an increase of 890,000 during the month.

Its 5G package subscribers reached 202 million, an increase of 6.08 million in February.

This came as China Unicom (0762) said its 5G package subscribers reached 164 million in February, a net increase of 4.4 million from the previous month.

Separately, Q Technology (1478) saw its net profit grow by 2.7 percent to 860 million yuan (HK$1.05 billion) last year, with no dividend declared. The Chinese smartphone component supplier's revenue grew 7.3 percent to 18.66 billion yuan over the same period, mainly thanks to higher sales volume of camera modules.

The company saw a 22.1 percent rise in the sales volume of camera modules last year but the growth was still below the goal set by the company, due to the Covid outbreak in the second half of last year, which affected the production capacity, as well as the ongoing shortage of semiconductor, it said in the filing

The pandemic, which also hurt the consumer sentiment, caused its gross margin drop 0.8 percentage points to 9.4 percent as its high-end products saw a worse-than-expected sale, it said.

Looking ahead, the company expected the sales volume of camera modules for mobile phones will achieve more than double-digit growth this year while the sales volume of non-smartphone camera modules will increase by not less than 100 percent in 2022.

The company also pledged to increase the sales volume of fingerprint recognition modules by not less than 20 percent over the previous year.