China Mobile has suffered its first fall in annual profits in 14 years as Tencent Holding's mobile messaging app service WeChat ate into its revenues.
The world's largest mobile phone network saw net profit fall 5.9% to 121.8bn yuan (£118bn) last year.
Quarterly profits were also lower at 30.3bn yuan (£2.9bn).
It said it would spend more this year on its 4G mobile network and believes customers will spend more on data to connect to services like WeChat.
China mobile also blamed falling revenue from text and multimedia messages, which fell 6.5% to 41.3bn yuan in 2013.
The mobile phone giant plans to increase spending by 22%, to 225.2bn yuan to expand its 4G service, which launched in December, and on continued iPhone handset subsidies.
Like WhatsApp, which was bought by the social networking site Facebook for $19bn last month, WeChat, allows customers to use the internet to avoid paying charges to send text and picture messages, formerly a lucrative source of revenue for mobile phone networks.
The messaging Apps. become a real threat to all mobile operators!
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