Carrier bets on data services (2)

Revenue from wireless data traffic accounts for 12.2 percent of the carrier's total revenue, up 3.8 percentage points from 2011. The proportion of short message and multimedia message services, in turn, dropped 0.9 percentage points, to 7.9 percent.

"Wireless data traffic has developed rapidly and become a key driver of revenue growth," said Xi.

The carrier's voice and short message service business may become even weaker as traffic on chat applications keeps ballooning. On a single day - Dec 31 - the number of outbound messages on WhatsApp hit 11 billion. In January, Apple Inc said that users on its iMessage service were sending more than 2 billion messages a day, up from 1 billion in June.

China Mobile hopes that the launch of its TD-LTE 4G network will help bring in much-needed additional revenue. The carrier has set aside 41.7 billion yuan this year to invest in its TD-LTE infrastructure, including building over 200,000 base stations nationwide. Last year, it spent around 5 billion yuan to build 20,000 base stations to test the new technology and decided that TD-LTE is mature enough for commercial promotion. The investment will account for a major part of the increase in its planned capital expenditure to 190 billion yuan this year, up from 127 billion in 2012.