Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

May 3, 2022 3:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Chunghwa Telecom Conference Call for the company's First Quarter 2022 Operating Results. [Operator Instructions] For information, this conference call is now being broadcast live over the Internet. Webcast replay will be available within an hour after the conference is finished. Please visit CHT IR website, www.cht.com.tw/ir under the IR Calendar section.

Now I'd like to turn it over to Ms. Angela Tsai, the Director of Investor Relations. Ms. Tsai, please go ahead.

Angela Tsai

Thank you. This is Angela Tsai, Director of Investor Relations for Chunghwa Telecom. Welcome to our first quarter 2022 results conference call. Joining me on the call today are Harrison Kuo, our President; and Vincent Chen, our Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, management will begin by providing an overview of our business in the first quarter followed by a discussion of our segment performance and financial highlights. After, we will move on to the question-and-answer portion of the call. On Slide 2, please note our safe harbor statement.

Now I will turn the call over to President Kuo. President Kuo, please go ahead.

Harrison Kuo

Thank you, Angela, and hello everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2022 earnings call. As an integrated telecom service provider, we achieved strong performance in the first quarter in terms of mobile, fixed broadband and ICT businesses under our new corporate structure. Let's go on Slide 4 for an overview of our business. In the first quarter, the mobile market in Taiwan remained steady although the competitive landscape may change as our peers announce their major plans. We were pleased to see the market consolidation and I believe the in-market structure could lead to further competition in Taiwan. For Chunghwa with our most extensive networks for services, we are fully confident in maintaining our leading position in the market going forward. Our revenue and our subscriber market share, excluding IoT SIMs, continued to outperform peers in the first quarter by reaching 39.1% and 36%, respectively, currently in the digital status.

Slide 5 presents our overall mobile business performance. Our mobile subscriber number, excluding IoT SIMs, increased by 0.7% year-over-year. With the successful upsell from existing subscribers, our mobile service revenue increased by 4.9% year-over-year and maintained its upward trend. In addition, 5G penetration developed steadily during the quarter, which helped to enhance the postpaid ARPU to achieve 3.2% year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, we observed an average 35% uplift in monthly fees attributable to customers who renewed contracts to adopt 5G services. Moving on to Slide 6 for an overview of our overall fixed broadband business. In the first quarter, we are pleased that we see both our fixed broadband subscriber number and high LAN subscriber number continuing to grow year-over-year reflecting our leading market share in Taiwan's fixed broadband market.