Operators' annual reports are all released. China Mobile states that the token market is opening rapidly. Decreased capital expenditure is forcing the industry chain to transform.

Ask AI · How can the token market accelerate the adoption of AI inference services?

Caixin Media News, March 26 (Reporter Fu Jing) After China Unicom (600050.SH) and China Telecom (601728.SH) released their annual reports, China Mobile (600941.SH) also disclosed its 2025 annual report this evening. With that, the latest performance updates for all three major telecom operators for the current earnings season have now been published.

Financial data shows that last year China Mobile generated revenue of 1,050.2 billion yuan, up 0.9%; net profit of 137.1 billion yuan. After excluding the impact of VAT treatment from separating package revenue, growth on the same basis was 2.0%. The EBITDA margin improved by 0.2 percentage points to 32.3%.

Last year, China Mobile accelerated its push into the computing power services business, achieving revenue of 89.8 billion yuan, up 11.1%, and with a revenue contribution ratio of 10%, up 0.9 percentage points. Data center revenue grew 8.7%, including AIDC revenue growth of 35.4%. Cloud computing services revenue grew 13.9%, including “smart computing” revenue growth of 279%.

At the earnings briefing held this evening, China Mobile’s management acknowledged that, based on the statement data, the company is indeed facing challenges on multiple fronts and will take a proactive approach to address them.

Because the industry is currently at a critical turning point in the shift from old to new drivers, over the past few years, the overall profitability of the three operators has weakened, with especially last year’s Q4 net profit falling noticeably on a quarter-over-quarter basis.

According to the annual report previously disclosed by China Unicom, last year it recorded operating revenue of 392.2 billion yuan, up 0.7%; net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 9.1 billion yuan, up 1.1%. For China Telecom, last year revenue was 523.9 billion yuan, up 0.1%; and attributable net profit was 33.2 billion yuan, up 0.5%.

However, China Mobile’s executives said that the overall upward and positive trend in the information and communications industry has not changed. This is reflected in strong computing power demand: as AI shifts from training to inference, token consumption will grow exponentially. The computing power market is short on supply relative to demand; intelligent applications are breaking through faster, with autonomous agent services becoming “all the rage overnight.” Industry digital/AI services are accelerating, and artificial intelligence will open up an additional value increment on the order of trillions.

China Mobile said it will, in the future, stay committed to its three core businesses: communication services, computing power services, and intelligent services. It plans to basically build a world-class technology services company by 2030 (communication services will ensure that revenue continues to grow steadily during the “Fifteenth Five-Year Plan” period; computing power services will strive to double revenue by the end of the “Fifteenth Five-Year Plan”; intelligent services will strive to double revenue by the end of the “Fifteenth Five-Year Plan”). By 2035, it will fully build a world-class technology services company, becoming a global leading communications operator, computing power operator, and intelligent operator.

For computing power services, China Mobile said it will accelerate upgrades to AIDC, computing power, and token capabilities. First, it will increase investment in AIDC hub nodes, build more GW-level computing power parks; this year in April, the Hong Kong Fireston data center will begin operations. Second, it will accelerate computing power supply, build ultra-large-scale intelligent computing clusters, upgrade the compute-and-network “brain,” and support efficient unified scheduling of internal and external computing power resources. Third, it will strengthen token operations, promote mobile cloud integration to build trusted inference services using high-quality models; it will connect the service chain of “agents using tokens, and tokens driving computing power.” The token market is rapidly opening up.

It is understood that, to date, the company’s offline channels have installed the “dragon shrimp” application for tens of thousands of customers, and more than 40,000 customers use mobile cloud computing power services to “raise dragon shrimp.”

It is also worth noting that China Mobile previously acquired Hong Kong Broadband, while continuously strengthening its industrial layout in areas including data centers, intelligent connected vehicles, the low-altitude economy, and quantum technology.

From the perspective of capital expenditure, in 2025 China Mobile completed capital expenditure of 150.9 billion yuan, down 8.0% year over year. Caixin Media reporter learned that China Mobile’s planned capital expenditure for 2026 is 136.6 billion yuan, down 9.5% year over year. Among them, capital expenditure for communication networks will decrease somewhat, while capital expenditure for computing power networks and intelligent networks will rise significantly—up 62.4% and 19.8%, respectively. Among the three networks, the share of investment in computing power networks and intelligent networks exceeds 37%.

It is understood that in 2025, the capital expenditures of the three major operators decreased significantly compared with the investment peak in 2023, with the total amount down by about 20%.

As a leader in the communications industry chain, every move by the three major operators directly affects the development of the industry. Especially in recent years, as capital expenditure overall has shown a declining trend—traditional network investment has fallen and shifted toward computing power and AI—pressure has mounted on demand in the traditional communications equipment market, which in turn forces manufacturers to accelerate their transformation.

According to media reports, in 2025 Huawei’s sales revenue will be slightly higher than in 2024, but it is clearly lower than the 22.4% year-over-year growth rate in 2024. In 2025, within ZTE’s (000063.SZ) operator network business, the domestic market faced revenue pressure due to the decline in investment in communications infrastructure. As for its government and enterprise business, it was able to seize opportunities from increased smart computing investment by leading domestic internet companies and industry customers, resulting in revenue that doubled year over year.

An industry source in communications told Caixin Media reporter that, under the influence of industry cycle switching and changes in business mix, profitability pressure is a common phenomenon currently faced at the ICT equipment manufacturing end.

In addition, it is also worth noting that rising global storage prices compress the profit margins of computing power equipment and further increase profitability pressure for equipment vendors. Equipment vendors in the midstream face the dual pressure of upstream price increases and downstream strong bargaining power, leading to margin compression and a persistent squeeze on profit space. The industry as a whole is generally facing challenges in cost control and supply-chain stability.

(Caixin Media reporter Fu Jing)