As of September 30th, Chunghwa Telecom served 2.90 million FTTx subscribers, accounting for 63.7% of total broadband users. Moreover, the number of subscribers signing up for 60Mbps and higher speed connections increased by 32.7%, reaching 1.09 million.
On the mobile front, Chunghwa had 10.55 million mobile subscribers, representing a 3.4% year-over-year increase. In the third quarter of 2013, the company increased the number of mobile Internet subscribers by 60.7% year on year or 1.35 million, reaching 3.57 million and growing its market share to 34.1%. Mobile VAS revenue for the third quarter of 2013 increased by 37.4% to NT$7.37 billion, with mobile Internet revenue, the largest contributor to VAS revenue, increasing 58.5%.
Dr. Yen-Sung Lee, Chairman and CEO of Chunghwa Telecom, commented, “We are proud of the success we were able to achieve in the third quarter and very excited with the results of the recent 4G auction. Having secured 35 MHz of spectrum, the largest amount in the auction, including the highly-sought-after deployment-ready 1800 MHz spectrum, we believe we have the potential to be the first-to-market in offering 4G services throughout Taiwan in the second half of 2014. Through attraction of new users and vertical migration of existing users to higher tier data plans, mobile Internet subscriber growth continued to exceed our guidance. We further extended our market leadership in mobile, growing our mobile internet subscriber market share to 34.1%. In the smart phone segment, through the successful implementation of our promotional initiatives, we grew our smartphone penetration to 50%, necessitating we revise our year-end guidance upward.
