China Tower stepped up network investments in 2020, working with the country’s mobile operators to build 501,000 5G base stations and increased profit as revenue increased across all three business units.

Net profit grew 23.1 per cent year-on-year to CNY6.4 billion ($980.2 million) and operating revenue increased 6.1 per cent to CNY81.1 billion.

Revenue from its tower business rose 2.8 per cent to CNY73.37 billion and indoor distributed antenna system business by 32.7 per to CNY3.53 million. Turnover from trans-sector site application and information (TSSAI), and energy operation businesses soared 89.4 per cent to CNY3.94 billion.

Capex increased 36.8 per cent to CNY37.1 billion, with 69.8 per cent going to new site construction.

Chairman Tong Jilu stated with the country’s accelerated 5G network deployment, “we strengthened the market-oriented approach with customer demands and new 5G features in mind”, continued to drive resource sharing, and stepped up technological and product innovation to drive construction and service model transformation.

For its TSSAI business, Tong said the company will build on a trend for accelerated digitalisation and make use of “our core resources and capabilities to step up research and development investment, and collaboration within the ecosystem”.

Tong said it ended the year with 301,000 paid users for a battery exchange service.

China Mobile accounted for 50.3 per cent of total revenue, down from 52.2 in 2019, China Telecom 23.4 per cent and China Unicom 21.6 per cent.

The company built 29,000 new tower sites, increasing the total number managed to 2.02 million, and added 112,000 new tenants. The average tenancy per tower fell from 1.62 in 2019 to 1.57.