China Mobile reported 5.9% net profit decrease

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China Mobile Ltd today reported its first decrease in annual revenue for the last decade. The mobile operator revealed weaker than expected sales of the iPhone on their network, which disappointed the markets and kept the revenues under the analysts expectations. The net profit of China Mobile for 2013 reached 121.70 billion CNY (equals to about 19.6 billion USD), which reports a decrease of 5.9% compared to the profit of 129.30 billion CNY for 2012. The financial results show the first decrease in profits of the mobile giant since 1999, when the company reported significant losses due to network equipment and innovations.

The results highlight the fierce competition to attract customers to the largest mobile market in the world. For long time China Mobile dominates the Chinese market with over 775 million users, which makes it the Chinese and world’s largest mobile operator. Now the company is staying under pressure from the smaller operators, such as China Telecom Corp and China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd.

After the financial report for 2013 the shares of the company China Mobile Ltd dropped with 3.76%, or 1.68 USD, reaching a level of 42.94 USD per share. The market capitalization of the mobile operator is 172.58 billion USD.