China Unicom announced on Thursday that it had a total of 135.087 million cellular subscribers by the end of June 30, 2006, representing a net increase of 7.29 million as compared with the end of last year.

China Unicom Chairman Chang Xiaobing said at a press conference that in the first half of 2006, the company's overall profit grew by 20.2 percent over the same period last year, to 2.80 billion yuan(351.28 million U.S. dollars).

He said earnings for per share was 0.223 yuan.

Chang said apart from a steady growth of mobile business, the company's value-added services achieved robust revenue growth.

He said total revenue from wireless value-added services reached 8.0 billion yuan (1.004 billion U.S. dollars), representing an increase of 49.0 percent over last year's same period.

He said the long-distance, data and internet business also saw significant profitability improvement after the company restructured the product mix of its business.

He said, international cooperation continues to play a vital strategic role. In June, the company entered into a Strategic Alliance Framework Agreement with SK Telecom of South Korea and issued convertible bonds in an aggregated principal amount of 1 billion U.S. dollars to the same company.

Looking forward, Chang Xiaobing said, "we will continue to effectively promote our business. We will put equal focus on expanding user base and maintaining existing users of GSM business, to boost effectiveness and take revenues to a higher level. "

He said more efforts will be made to accelerate market expansion of the CDMA business and the company will continue to restructure the product mix of its long-distance, data and internet businesses.

Source: Xinhua