Late March, the three major operators released financial reports for 2020. Data show that China Mobile's operating income in 2020 is 695.7 billion yuan, up 3.2% year-on-year. China Telecom achieved operating income of 393.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.7%; In 2020, China Unicom achieved operating income of 303.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.6%. According to the data of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), by the end of last year, 718,000 5G base stations had been built and opened in China, realizing continuous coverage of all cities above prefecture level and key towns and cities. According to People's Post and Telecommunications Review, on the whole, the operators delivered a qualified answer sheet.

As the closing year of the 13th Five-Year Plan, 2020 is the very special year. Faced with the complicated situation of COVID-19 epidemic, accelerated economic and social digital transformation and diversified evolution of industry and cross-border competition, the three major operators strive to overcome various difficulties and challenges, insist on steady progress and promote high-quality development. Network construction, speed-up and fee-reduction, and innovation and reform have become three big tasks pressing on operators. However, in general, in 2020, the three major operators showed a steady and positive operation trend, and their revenues and profits all achieved positive growth. Among them, the growth rate of mobile data and Internet business revenue brought by consumer Internet traffic has slowed down, which has significantly reduced the performance of operators; However, the revenue from ICT solutions, such as cloud services and data centers, serving government and enterprise customers has increased significantly, and has become the first engine of growth. In addition, the revenue of fixed value-added telecom services, mainly IPTV, cloud computing and big data, also increased compared with last year, among which the revenue of cloud services increased most obviously.

In the past year, the biggest capital expenditure of operators was the construction of 5G networks. In order to build a 5G network more intensively and efficiently, China Telecom and China Unicom have joined hands to create a precedent of joint construction and sharing, and China Mobile and China Radio and Television have also announced joint construction, which further reduces the network operation cost and greatly shortens the network construction cycle. Another big fixed "expense" faced by operators is upspeeding and reducing fees. In 2020, the interests concession will be 46 billion yuan, and the accumulated amount will be nearly 500 billion yuan across the six years.

With the continuous adjustment and optimization of operators' products, the basic business has gradually recovered, and the value of innovative business has become prominent. Take China Unicom as an example. In 2020, mobile service revenue reached 156.7 billion yuan, which turned negative to positive year-on-year; The ARPU of mobile users reached 42.1 yuan, up 4.1% year-on-year. The three major operators have maintained a healthy development momentum in ToC and ToB business. In 2020, the number of government and enterprise customers of China Mobile reached 13.84 million, with a net increase of 3.56 million. The revenue of the special line reached RMB 24 billion, a year-on-year increase of 19.3%; Mobile cloud revenue reached RMB 9.2 billion, up 353.8% year-on-year. China's telecom industry digital revenue reached RMB 84 billion, up 9.7% year-on-year, and the whole network cloud business revenue reached RMB 13.8 billion, up 58.4% year-on-year.