China Telecom Q3 Profit Falls; China Mobile Earnings Drop

China Telecom’s third-quarter net profit fell about 15% from a year earlier to roughly 6.6 billion yuan, as revenue slipped around 3% to about 121 billion yuan, trade publication Light Reading reported, with rival China Mobile also posting a double-digit drop in quarterly earnings.

Light Reading attributed the declines to weak consumer spending and a value-added tax increase that took effect at the start of 2026, noting that the state-owned operators did not offer an explanation for the drop.

Nine-month profit down 14.8%

For the first nine months of the year, China Telecom’s net profit attributable to shareholders fell 14.8% to 26.2 billion yuan, according to The Standard and BigGo Finance. BigGo put operating revenue for the period at 380.1 billion yuan, down 3.6%, while profit excluding non-recurring items fell 18.9% to 23.3 billion yuan.

Core business revenue reached 359.3 billion yuan, of which communications services contributed 313.1 billion yuan and the company’s “intelligence” business 46.2 billion yuan, The Standard reported. BigGo noted the quarterly report did not give a year-on-year growth rate for the intelligence segment. Net operating cash flow rose 11.92% to 97.7 billion yuan over the nine months, BigGo said.

China Telecom had 445 million mobile subscribers at the end of September, including 330 million 5G users, and 201.5 million wireline broadband subscribers, according to BigGo.

China Mobile and China Tower

China Mobile’s third-quarter earnings fell more than 12% to about 27.5 billion yuan, while quarterly revenue dropped 3.4% to 242 billion yuan, Light Reading said. Its nine-month net income declined 7.9% to 106.2 billion yuan. The operator counted about 1.01 billion mobile customers, around 702 million of them on 5G.

BigGo Finance said China Telecom’s nine-month profit decline was nearly twice that of China Mobile.

Infrastructure provider China Tower took a different path, with third-quarter profit up 13% to 3.3 billion yuan even as revenue fell 5.7% to 23.3 billion yuan, City News Service reported.

Hong Kong-listed China Telecom shares fell 8.8% over the week, while China Mobile dropped 5% and China Tower 5.5%, according to Light Reading. China Telecom’s Shanghai-listed A-shares closed 1.51% higher at 6.72 yuan on Thursday, BigGo reported.

What’s next

China Telecom said it had accelerated its push to become a leading AI service provider, The Standard reported, and plans to turn itself into a service-oriented, technology-oriented and secure enterprise. BigGo cited the company’s Xingchen TokenHub platform and TeleAgent super agent among its AI products, and said it intends to build next-generation communications and computing power networks at what it called a moderately advanced pace.

China Mobile, for its part, said it is pursuing a transformation “into a technology services enterprise,” according to Light Reading.

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