The company’s board of directors declared an interim dividend of HKD 1.826 per share for 2018, equivalent to a dividend payout ratio of 48 percent.
In terms of network construction, China Mobile reports it added 190,000 4G base stations in the first half of the year. The company saw a net addition of 18.61 million mobile customers in the first half of 2018, driving the total number of mobile customers beyond the 900 million milestone. Among this base 680 million are 4G customers. With a net addition of 27.32 million 4G customers in the first half of 2018, the 4G penetration rate of China Mobile’s mobile customers has reached 74.7 percent.
The operator saw its household broadband customers reach 18.80 million at 30 June, accounting for 57 percent of the total number of net additional customers in the industry, driving the total number of our household broadband customers to 128 million. An increasing number of customers have opted for China Mobile’s higher-end products, with 42.5 percent of the operator’s customers using broadband with bandwidth of 100Mbps or above, up by 20.5 percentage points from the end of 2017. Household broadband revenue reached CNY 21.0 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 49.1 percent.
In the first half of this year, the number of subscribers for Mobaihe has exceeded 79.15 million, with a net addition of 21.90 million since the end of 2017. Penetration of this service amongst our household broadband customers reached 61.7 percent. Household broadband blended ARPU reached CNY 34.8, or an increase of 7.3 percent.
