Computing services are China Unicom's main growth line, but at 12% growth they are not yet large enough to offset flat telecom revenue and higher costs.
China Unicom said net profit for the first nine months of 2026 fell 33.6% from a year earlier to RMB13.28 billion, even as its computing business grew. Operating revenue rose 0.6% to RMB294.647 billion, and computing power revenue rose 12.2%, the Hong Kong-listed carrier said in results reported by AASTOCKS on October 29.
China Unicom’s revenue rose 0.6% to RMB294.65 billion in the first nine months, while computing power revenue grew 12.2%. Service revenue, the core telecom business, fell 0.28% to RMB260.89 billion, The Standard reported. International business revenue rose 14.5% and research and development spending rose 7.5%. Mobile 5G network customers reached 255.63 million, up 2.86%, The Standard reported.
The nine-month decline is only slightly narrower than the 34.6% drop China Unicom reported for the first half, which the company had said would shrink significantly by year end.
Value-added tax and staff costs drove the earlier profit fall
China Unicom did not explain the nine-month decline in the reports. In August, it attributed its first-half drop to value-added tax and a change in the timing of employee benefit spending, and said it expected the full-year profit decline to "narrow significantly" as staff costs stayed stable over the year, according to its interim results release. It described that forecast as its own estimate, not a commitment.
The third quarter did little to change that. Third-quarter revenue was RMB93.28 billion, up 0.5% from a year earlier, according to the company’s Shanghai-listed unit’s quarterly report, so the top line gave no extra lift. First-half profit was RMB9.47 billion, so third-quarter profit was about RMB3.81 billion. The reported figures imply nine-month profit of about RMB20 billion in 2025 and third-quarter profit of about RMB5.5 billion, so the quarter was still down about 31% from a year earlier.
Computing is growing, but from a base too small to carry the group
China Unicom groups data centers, computing services, digital applications and cloud AI services as computing power revenue. In the first half, that line brought in RMB41.9 billion, up 13%, and accounted for 23.6% of service revenue, according to the interim release. Capital expenditure in the first half was RMB24.1 billion. Computing took 37% of it, and computing investment rose more than 80% from a year earlier. Within computing revenue, data-center revenue rose 11% and computing service revenue rose 9% in the first half. Operating cash flow reached RMB32.9 billion, up 13.6%, which the company called a record for recent years.
Nine-month computing revenue grew 12.2%, AASTOCKS reported, with revenue from intelligent computing centers up 10.4%, according to Zhitong Finance. Unicom Cloud served about 562,000 large institutional and industry customers in the third quarter, and paying users of its cloud-AI products reached 123.5 million, up 6% from the second quarter, The Standard reported. The company said it is building capabilities across the generation, storage, transmission, cleansing and application of tokens, the units AI models process, to operate as a supplier of "high-value tokens." The company gave the cloud customer count and cloud-AI user numbers only as quarterly snapshots, without revenue figures, so the size of the AI business within computing revenue remains undisclosed.
The arithmetic explains why. Growth of 12% in a business worth about a quarter of service revenue adds roughly three percentage points to service revenue growth. With service revenue down 0.28% overall, the rest of the business shrank, and computing growth was not enough to offset that or the cost pressures the company cited in August.
The full-year result will test the company’s forecast
China Unicom’s annual results in March will show whether the profit decline narrows as the company said in August, and whether the dividend holds. The company declared no interim dividend this year, after paying a final dividend of RMB0.1329 a share for 2025, announced in March.
The other signal is spending: how much China Unicom commits to computing in 2027, and whether computing revenue growth accelerates above 12%, will show whether the strategy can lift profit or only revenue.