China Unicom, the Shanghai-listed body of China's second largest telecom company, posted a net profit of 1.65 billion yuan (200.62 million U.S. dollars.) in the first half year, up 19.1 percent from the same period last year.

The company's half-year report shows the earning per share was 0.078 yuan.

It earned 40.25 billion yuan (5.03 billion U.S. dollars) from its main services, up 6.1 percent year on year.

Operating revenue from GSM services totaled 26.47 billion yuan, CDMA 12.69 billion yuan, and the long-distance, data and Internet business 1.09 billion yuan.

The report highlighted the contribution made by Unicom's GSM services, saying this revenue had climbed 13.3 percent from the same time last year with more subscribers in the first half.

GSM services contributed 3.5 billion yuan to Unicom's booming pre-tax net profit, while that of the CDMA service was only 280 million yuan.

China Unicom shares closed at 2.32 yuan on Thursday, the same as that of Wednesday.

The company's Hong Kong-listed arm released its mid-year report a day earlier, saying its net profits grew by 20.2 percent to 2.8 billion yuan.

China Unicom announced on Thursday that it had 135.087 million cellular subscribers by the end of June making it the world's third largest telecom company by subscriber population, and the second largest CDMA provider.

Source: Xinhua