China Mobile Profit in the first quarter amounted to 5.4% on sales of data

5: 39 Pm EDT by Bloomberg News, April 20, 2011

(Updates with sales in the second paragraph).

April 20 (Bloomberg) - China Mobile Ltd., carrier of greatest phone of the world by the users, reported an increase of 5.4% in the first quarter profit as sales were lifted by mobile Web users to download music and games on smartphones.Net profit rose to 26.9 billion yuan ($4.1 billion), of 25.5 billion yuan a year earlier, the carrier said in a statement to the stock exchange of Hong Kong today. Sales increased from 8.3% to 118.2 billion yuan.President Wang Nurhaci expects company data will be an important source of future earnings growth and plans to increase spending of 6.5 percent this year to strengthen investment services. "China Mobile spend as much as 117.7 billion yuan to invest in the network and to add wireless access points that it aims to keep attracting smartphone users and help maintain its advance on China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. and China Telecom Corp." is data revenues which are clearly on the rise"Colin McCallum, an analyst with Credit Switzerland Group AG in Hong Kong, wrote in a report April 15." "This seems to be a very healthy ratio of income to the volume, which China Mobile management has put an end to a deliberate strategy to avoid unlimited data packets.Profit in the first quarter has been projected to 26.8 billion yuan on sales of 119 billion yuan, according to the median of four analysts estimates in a survey.3G of Bloomberg News ServiceChina Mobile rose 0.8 per cent from HK$ 72.60 4 hours near trade in Hong Kong before the earnings announcement. The stock market dropped by 6 percent this year.China Mobile had a total of 584 million subscribers to mobile phone late last year, including of 20.7 million users of the service high-speed third generation who use smart phones to surf the Web, the company said in February.That was exceeded by China Unicom 311. 3 million total subscribers and 14.1 million users of its service 3 g. China Telecom was in third place with 90.5 million total subscribers.To continue to attract users of data of high-end, Wang said last month that the company would boost subsidies for handsets from 15% to 17.5 billion yuan this year.China Unicom and China Telecom will report earnings next week.

-Edmond Lococo. Editor: Suresh Seshadri, Chua Kong Ho.

To communicate with the staff of Bloomberg News on this story: Edmond Lococo in Beijing at elococo@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Cho Young-Sam to ycho2@bloomberg.net

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