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By Xie Fang

China’s mobile telecommunication behemoth China Mobile released its audited financial statements for the past three quarters of 2018 Monday evening, reporting its first decline in revenue since 2014, The Paper reported.

According to the statements, China Mobile generated 567.7 billion yuan (around 81.83 U.S. dollars) in revenue over the past three quarters of this year, a year-on-year decrease of 0.3 percent. Contrary to its revenue drop, the company reported a 3.1 percent uptick in its net profit, which reached 95 billion yuan (around 13.69 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of September.

China Mobile cited the cancellation of roaming charges on data traffic and the increasingly fierce competition among China’s telecommunication operators as the reasons for the decline in its revenue.

China’s three largest telecommunication operators, namely China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, all stopped charging users for the roaming of data traffic on July 1 this year.

Despite the lackluster revenue growth, China Mobile remains the country’s largest telecommunication operator by user base and revenue as well.

The financial statements show that as of the end of September, its mobile subscribers have reached about 916 million, of which roughly 695 million are 4G users. Over the reporting period, the company added a total of 45.78 million users to its 4G user base.

What’s more, the user base of the company’s broadband service also amounted to 147 million by the end of September, which made China Mobile supersede China Telecom as the country’s largest broadband service provider.

China Mobile’s mobile data traffic business also maintained a robust growth over the reporting period as its total data traffic consumed on cell phones surged by 172 percent from a year earlier.