China Unicom aims to achieve an operating revenue of 392.22 billion yuan by 2025, with computing power investments this year potentially exceeding 100 billion yuan.

(Source: Beijing Capital Circle)

On the evening of March 19, China Unicom Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “China Unicom”) disclosed its 2025 annual report. The announcement shows that in 2025, China Unicom achieved operating revenue of 392.22 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 0.7%. Among them, main business revenue was 347.74 billion yuan, up 0.5% year-on-year; total profit was 25.3 billion yuan, with net profit attributable to the parent company of 9.13 billion yuan, up 1.1%. In 2025, China Unicom’s net cash flow from operating activities was 91.41 billion yuan, capital expenditure was 54.15 billion yuan, and free cash flow was 37.26 billion yuan, an increase of 24.7% year-on-year.

Chairman Dong Xin of China Unicom stated at the performance briefing that evening that in 2026, China Unicom will strictly control capital expenditure at around 50 billion yuan, with more than 35% allocated to computing power investments. In the long term, the proportion of computing power investments in China Unicom’s capital expenditure will continue to increase.

Based on this, it means that China Unicom plans to invest over 10 billion yuan this year to boost computing power.

The announcement also states that China Unicom plans to distribute a final dividend of 0.0523 yuan per share. Combined with the interim dividend of 0.1112 yuan per share already paid, the total dividend for 2025 will be 0.1635 yuan per share, totaling approximately 5.112 billion yuan (tax included) to China Unicom shareholders.

User base surpasses 1.2 billion

Revenue structure continues to improve

In 2025, China Unicom continued to improve network coverage, enhance network quality, and promote the extension of connection forms from mobile and broadband networks to the Internet of Things, vehicle networking, and industrial Internet, evolving towards low-altitude intelligent networking and satellite Internet to meet the needs for high-speed, ubiquitous, intelligent, efficient, stable, and reliable connections.

In terms of enhancing network capabilities, China Unicom implemented “signal upgrade” and “broadband upgrade,” promoted co-construction and sharing, and optimized network maintenance. Mobile network population coverage exceeded 99%. Key scenario network perception gained user recognition, with over 330 5G-A base stations deployed in cities. The company advanced gigabit capacity expansion and ten-gigabit upgrades, with nearly 90% of broadband capable of gigabit access, and trial commercial deployment of ten-gigabit optical networks in over 100 cities. Additionally, China Unicom is exploring frontier fields such as 6G and quantum communication, launching quantum secure dedicated lines.

In expanding connection scenarios, China Unicom’s total user base exceeded 1.2 billion, an increase of 110 million from the previous year. The company adheres to the integrated development of broadband and mobile networks, with net user growth exceeding 20 million. The penetration rate of integrated services surpasses 78%, and ARPU (average revenue per user) of bundled packages remains above 100 yuan. China Unicom accelerates scenario-based transformation, with IoT scale surpassing 700 million, consolidating its leading position in the vehicle networking market, and 5G private network revenue reaching 12.3 billion yuan, an increase of over 50%. At the same time, China Unicom is seizing opportunities in the low-altitude economy, building an integrated low-altitude intelligent network for sensing, communication, and computing. Furthermore, China Unicom obtained a satellite mobile communication business license in 2025, promoting large-scale applications of direct satellite connections for mobile phones.

From the revenue structure perspective, China Unicom’s revenue structure continued to optimize in 2025. The announcement shows that in 2025, China Unicom seized new opportunities in technological and industrial innovation, implementing the “Artificial Intelligence+” initiative. Revenue from strategic emerging industries accounted for over 86%, and revenue from computing power services exceeded 15%, an increase of 1.1 percentage points from the previous year. AI-related revenue grew by over 140% year-on-year. International business revenue reached 13.6 billion yuan, an increase of over 9%.

In 2025, China Unicom’s total capital expenditure was 54.2 billion yuan, with capital expenditure as a percentage of main business revenue decreasing to 16%. Through deepening co-construction and sharing, building a simplified network, and achieving annualized OPEX savings of 1.35 billion yuan, the company improved investment efficiency.

Intelligent computing scale reaches 45 EFLOPS

Data center PUE improves by 5% year-on-year

Dong Xin stated at the performance meeting that computing power represents the future, and China Unicom regards it as a driver for future upgrades. The company will build on a solid computing power foundation and focus on practical applications of big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud-network integration.

The announcement shows that in 2025, China Unicom’s data center revenue was 28.1 billion yuan, an increase of 8.5% year-on-year. Last year, the company strengthened resource deployment in the “East Data West Computing” hub nodes and green computing power demonstration provinces. The standard rack scale exceeded 1.1 million racks, with 7 megawatt-level AIDC parks built, rack utilization rate over 72%, and intelligent computing scale reaching 45 EFLOPS (floating point operations per second). China Unicom also adheres to green development, promoting energy-saving technologies, with unit traffic energy consumption decreasing by 12.9% year-on-year, and data center PUE improving by 5%.

Additionally, China Unicom accelerated the construction of the new “Eight Vertical and Eight Horizontal” backbone optical cable network, adding over 9,000 kilometers to interconnect computing hubs and support regional coordinated development.

In 2025, China Unicom will accelerate its evolution toward AI cloud, deepen large-scale intelligent cloud-native practices, enhance unified orchestration and scheduling capabilities, and establish a new “application + model + resource” computing power management model. This supports the construction of over 180 provincial and municipal government clouds, empowers nearly 400,000 enterprise customers in digital transformation, and promotes the “AI Smart Choice Unicom Cloud” brand image. Cloud revenue grew by 5.2% year-on-year.

Furthermore, in 2025, China Unicom will establish a national AI application pilot base, launching platforms such as “Vast Data,” “Yuanjing” MaaS, and “Wantu” intelligent platform, accumulating over 400TB of high-quality datasets, providing more than 140 mainstream industry models, and gathering over 10,000 developers to help customers quickly build intelligent applications.

The announcement indicates that in the future, China Unicom will focus on “computing power” as the core, moderately advance infrastructure construction, strengthen integrated operation of computing service platforms, and use new algorithms and technologies to promote the integration of cloud, network, edge, and terminal. The goal is to make computing power as accessible and instant as water and electricity, creating a new engine for high-quality productivity.