(Yicai Global) March 20 -- China Mobile Communications plans to invest CNY100 billion (USD14 billion) in fifth-generation wireless network communications this year in a surge of 317 percent over last year's CNY24 billion (USD3.4 billion), despite only a slight rise in revenue and a nearly 10 percent drop in profit last year, the Chinese communications giant said in the earnings report it released yesterday.

Its annual revenue hit about CNY746 billion last year in yearly 1.2 percent growth  and its profit attributable to shareholders was around CNY107 billion in an annual  9.5 percent shrinkage, per the report.

The company has budgeted some CNY180 billion as its capital expenditures this year, of which 5G-related investment plans will claim CNY100 billion-odd to enable it to build a leading 5G network and strategic cloud infrastructure, it said.

Beijing-based China Mobile will speed up its 5G-plus comprehensive upgrade this year, build 250,000 5G base stations, and push 100 typical 5G demonstration projects. It set up over 50,000 base stations, provided 5G commercial services in 50 cities, and added 2.5 million package customers last year. It had built and opened more than 80,000 base stations and gained 15.4 million plan subscribers as of last month, it said.

Covid-19 will certainly negatively impact the firm's businesses, such as voice traffic, with some informatization services also affected, as well as international roaming consumption, the company said in addressing the pandemic's influence on this year's results.

The pestilence has fueled demand for online, smart cloud-based services, which will greatly spur the sector's digitization needs and hasten the transformation of all of society's digital services. "It coincides with the company's 5G development window period and affords great opportunities for the company to speed its expansion of its information and communications services segment," China Mobile said in the report.

Editors: Zhang Yushuo, Ben Armour