(Yicai Global) Jan. 26 -- China invested CNY405.8 billion (USD64.2 billion) in fixed telecoms assets last year, with 45.6 percent of that going toward developing the country’s fifth-generation wireless networks, up from 36.7 percent the year before.

China spent CNY184.9 billion (USD29.3 billion) on 5G networks last year, according to the 2021 Statistical Bulletin on Communications Industry released yesterday by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The number of base stations rose by 650,000 to almost 10 million last year, the report noted. Nearly 1.43 million of them were 5G, of which more than 650,000 were newly built.

Mobile phone users topped 1.6 billion, with each person having on average 1.16 handsets. Fourth-generation and 5G phone users accounted for nearly 1.1 billion and 355 million, respectively, accounting for 86.7 percent of the total.

Average mobile data traffic was 13.4 gigabytes per user, up 29.2 percent from a year earlier. The figure soared to a record high of 14.7 GB last December.

Annual revenue at Chinese telecoms operators rose an average 8 percent to CNY1.5 trillion (USD232.6 billion), some 4.1 percentage points higher than in 2020, the report added.

The development of emerging businesses such as cloud computing and big data has accelerated. Revenue soared 27.8 percent to CNY222.5 billion, accounting for 15.5 percent of all telecoms business revenue, compared with 12.8 percent the previous year. The data center, cloud computing, and big data businesses grew 18.4 percent, 91.5 percent, and 35.5 percent, respectively.

Editor: Futura Costaglione