China Unicom (Hong Kong) Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Meng Shu Shen. I'm delighted today to be able to be with you once again today, and we are very grateful for your long-term support to China Unicom. On behalf of the management of the company, I welcome you earnestly to the 2024 annual results announcement. Today, we have two items. First of all, our chairman would speak to us, and then the management would communicate with fellow media and analyst friends. And during this process, the management would answer questions that are within the scope of the result announcement. If time allows, If time does not allow and there are certain questions that you're interested in, we would follow up with those questions. We would conduct our result announcement in Putonghua, yet we provide English simultaneous interpreting. During this process, please turn your phone to mute or vibration mode. So allow me to introduce to you those management and Members of the Board of Directors that are with us today. First of all, Mr. Chen Zhongyue, Chairman and CEO. Mr. Jianqing, Executive Director and President. Executive Director, Mr. Wang Junzhi. Senior Vice President, Mr. Tang Yongbo. Ms. Li Yuzuo, Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer, as well as Mr. Hao Liqian, Senior Vice President. Now, may I invite Mr. Chen Zhongyue, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, to walk us through 2024 company results. Mr. Chen, please. Respected analyst, Investors, friends from the media, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome to the result announcement today, 2024 China and Unicom had focused on connectivity communications as well as computing and digital smart appliances to innovation and make certain breakthroughs. Our operating revenue have been growing steadily to 386 points, 89.6 billion. That's a 4.6% increase. Our profitability has reached $20.6 billion, and that is a 10.1% over the same period last year. Our return on equity has increased by 5.8%, and as far as our CC is concerned, our subscriber base has reached a new height. Total mobile and broadband subscribers has reached 470 million, and the in IoT connections is greater than 620 million. Internet of vehicles has 76 million connections. And also we have on our GoWoo industrial network platform we have access to over 12 million devices. That's one-eighth of the country's volume. And we have a 17.1% increase in our Unicom cloud revenue at 68.6 billion. Data center revenue is 25.9 billion at a 7.4% of increase. And net contract value of intelligent computing businesses exceeded 26 billion RMB. So thanks a lot for your support. and upcoming, let me walk you through our three areas of innovation and our main results. First of all, network innovation. We have been building a new infrastructure in a quality way. We insist on a very accurate investment strategy and to deepen our integration and push forward for intelligent operation on an overall scale. And we have reached and international as well as domestic integration in 2024, our capex was at 61.37 billion. That's a year-on-year decline or reduction of 17 percent, of which 19 percent is on computing power. With a better quality network and more efficient computing, our capex has been saved by 1.9 billion and that is a per unit business uh... energy consumption of ten percent less than before we have a mobile network population up by one percentage point reaching coverage of nineteen nine percent and that's benefiting millions of subscribers and we also have broadband ports increased by five percent reaching millions of households and we have mobile network base exceeding 4.5 million in trains and various communities. reaching a very deep penetration. We also enlarged commercial use of 5GA, and we have realized loading one gigabyte and downloading 10 gigabyte speed deployment of carrier aggregation in 300 cities. And also, REDCap is now enabled in over 150 cities. The proportion of 10G PON ports exceeded 80%, whereas the number of broadband ports is at 280 million. We focus on Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and took the lead to build over 10 gigabyte cities. With this we have been able to enlarge our capability and coverage. We accelerated the development from IDC to AIDC, and in Shanghai, Guangdong, Hong Kong, as well as in the Mongolian, Ningxia, and Guizhou provinces, we had built large-scale computing centers and had built over 300 integrated training and inference computing resource pools. The total scale of intelligent computing exceeded 17 eFlops and IDC cabinets of 420K, and we have been building eight AInet hubs and 22 provincial nodes. With Computing Power Intelligent Network, AInet, and we also have a Sin Law computing power allocation platform. So this is also an international network with more resources. We enhance Asia Pacific, Asia Africa, and also our accessibility to other areas of the world. In Qingdao and in Haikou, we had built over 400 business units and more than 60 international marine and terrestrial cables. into over 200 countries and regions. And we also make use of Hong Kong data center in Hong Kong, as well as Tokyo, Singapore, Frankfurt, to connect over 50 resource pools. And we also provide high quality computing network services to clients worldwide. And also technology innovation. We deepen our artificial intelligence technology, data technology, information technology, communication technology, and operational technology to enhance our core capabilities. We also invest our in our R&D, we have added on with an additional 9.1% increment in our R&D investment. And 42% of our proportion of our team is of innovation talent, technically. And 10% is in R&D. We also in the Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, The Big Bay Area as well as Yangtze River Delta, we built our innovation entities. We also established China Unicom Data Intelligence Company, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, as since last year we have got a series of accolades. We were awarded the first prize in National Science and Technology Progress as well as the GSMA Global Mobile Awards. Now we also worked ahead on the next generation internet. We played a leading role in this area. We pushed internet 2030 basic protocols and system architecture We also invested in wide area lossless transmission and internet work computing power allocation. such key technologies. And for the first time, we have exceeded over 3,000 kilometers of lossless transmission and over 200 kilometers of internet computing. And this is a very high level of digital intelligent quality. In Qinghai, we built the Sanjian Park, demonstrating integration of green power with intelligent computing. and we have realized 10,000 accelerator green computing to achieve computing electricity integration. The cluster average utilization rate is more than 60%. We also worked on key technologies such as millimeter waves, multi-frequency sensing, and reconfigurable intelligence services. and we also work on internet of cars to realize ultra low latency, high precision, position and dense sensing. and we also achieved key technology in internet technologies and we have built in Anyang and Nanjing national grade experimental zones. We also started on 6G experiment and certification and to get ourselves prepared for the next generation of technology. We also worked on key technologies in the big, big, big data area to work on data sets, high-quality data sets, and also mature standards advanced technology data platform. And we also built a trusted data space platform which is leading data governance and data security capabilities. And we also built the uni AI platforms through key technologies such as adaptive slow thinking and a symmetric MOE architecture. And we also work on leading multimodal technologies, especially as it works with uni AI mass platform and also over a thousand industrial models. We also built over a thousand automatic interpreting models. And thirdly, service innovation. We embraced AI to launch a series of new AI products and services to open up our market and create value and capabilities. Digital service is innovative and we provide different smart services for different scenarios. We have 5G new calling, cloud phone, cloud computer, smart home tone robot, smart customer service AI agents, etc. We also connect Unicom Cloud Drive video ringtone Unicom UHD FTTR. We have over 180 million users in Unicloud and we continue to promote integrated development and our integrated subscribers is now at 77% with an integrated subscriber output exceeding 100 RMB. We continue to build our intelligent upgrade to integrate AI model training, native storage, lossless network and cluster coordination, to provide different model intelligence services, to provide a one-stop service. China Unicom as the Harbin ASIAN WINTER GAMES, WE HAD SECURED FOR THE FIRST TIME TELECOM OPERATORS PROVIDING CLOUD AND SERVICES DURING INTERNATIONAL SPORTS EVENTS. WITH MILLISECOND LEVELS, ELASTIC RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND AI-DRIVEN TRAFFIC, FORECASTING CAN REDUCE LATENCY. We also service the People's Daily in their coverage. And we also had released the huge potential in media use of AI. And with industrial internet, we the first national A-level dual cross-platform Go industrial internet platform to put together 5G industrial internet projects, over 29,000 of it and over 7,100 as 5G factories. We also have over 4,100 factories. So we are leading both in market penetration as well as market share. We are building integrated platforms to deliver on city management on a integrated digital government INCREASES. OUR INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CONTINUES TO GROW AND OUR REVENUE IS AT $12.5 BILLION. THAT'S A 15.2% INCREASE OVER LAST YEAR. IN SAUDI ARABIA, PERU, UAE, AND UBEKISTAN, WE HAD SET UP 40 GLOBAL BRANCHES TO SERVE OVER 10,000 INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS, ESPECIALLY IN THE of Vehicles and also to assist Chinese company to go abroad and to assist new energy cars. And last November, we had launched Unicom International brand and continue to accelerate on our international development and to enhance our international management capabilities. We also fulfill our corporate ESG responsibilities. We deepened our efficient use of energy. We also use clean energy and we have been awarded national green computing centers in 22 countries. We also had is serving the society in the sense of 260,000 villages and 280 million users to serve the village by digital platforms. And we also set up 8,000 business outlets to serve smart elderly assistance services centers. And we also work on corporate governance to shoulder our responsibility as a listed company. We had over 160 investors in events and we are more open, more trustworthy and more trusted. And we had been received We had been awarded with different accolades, and this year we had been included in the FTSE China A50 Index, which would become effective this Friday. So we are determined to share our returns with our shareholders. Based on the good results, we decide to... to enhance 5% points of dividend payout ratio, and we also increase our dividend payout by 20.1% to 0.4043 RMB. In the last year, We have been working on enhancing our quality, our efficiency, and our revenue, as well as our innovation. 2025, our operation and our Investment would also improve. We anticipate that CapEx would be around 55 billion of which computing power would increase by 28% year on year. And also with AI and important projects and we have made special budgets for these special projects. So thanks for your support. We will continue to push on our three areas of innovation and also to enhance our innovation momentum and to strengthen our capabilities and also to optimize our business structure, improve our operation efficiency, and enhance our brand image. on creating more values for the society as well as for our investors. Thank you.