China Mobile saw its first-quarter revenues grow 3.9 percent year-on-year to CNY 160.8 billion, and EBITDA rose 2.8 percent to CNY 59.1 billion. EBITDA margin declined to 36.8 percent from 37.2 a year ago. Net profit dropped 5.6 percent to CNY 23.8 billion.
Despite adding 8.75 million new customers in the three months ended 31 March 2015, for a total 815.38 million at the end of March, China Mobile saw voice traffic drop to 1.02 trillion minutes from 1.08 trillion minutes in the fourth quarter of 2014. Average voice traffic per customer fell over the same period to 429 minutes per month from 446 in December 2014. SMS traffic fell to 146.2 billion messages from 156.1 billion messages in the previous quarter.
Mobile data traffic jumped by 158 percent compared to the first quarter of 2014 to 490.3 billion MB. The operator ended March with over 234.7 million 3G users, down from 245.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2014, while the 4G subscriber base expanded to 143 million in March 2015 from 90 million users at 31 December 2014. ARPU increased to CNY 58 per month in Q1 2015, from CNY 58 in Q4 2014.
