On August 5th, as per the latest data on the economic performance of the communication industry in the first half of 2026, released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China's telecommunications business revenue amounted to RMB 887.3 billion in the first six months of this year, marking a 2.1% year-on-year decrease. This growth rate represents a record low for domestic telecommunications industry revenue growth in recent times.

This outcome is not attributable to a single isolated [Original: 'Occasionally' (misused); Corrected to: 'isolated'] factor; rather, it is a reflection of the concentrated eruption of various developmental contradictions as the entire industry steps into a period of profound transformation.

The traditional growth model, which hinged on user expansion to fuel revenue, has utterly collapsed. Coupled with escalating policy-driven fixed costs and the fact that emerging value-added services, such as computing services and industry clouds, are still in their nascent stages of development, the combined effect of multiple internal and external factors has further intensified the telecommunications industry's longstanding predicament of 'increasing volume without increasing revenue.'

In the first half of 2026, the duration of outgoing mobile calls witnessed a 6.2% year-on-year decrease, while outgoing fixed-line call duration plummeted by 20.4%. During the same period, national mobile SMS traffic experienced an 8% year-on-year decline, with revenue from SMS-related services nose-diving by 12.9%.

This indicates that traditional voice and SMS services, once the cornerstone of operators' revenue, have now embarked on an irreversible and sustained downward spiral, unable to provide stable support for overall revenue anymore.

In stark contrast to the overall contraction of traditional services, the scale of data consumption by domestic users continues to soar rapidly. In the first half of this year, the total cumulative mobile internet traffic surged to 219.7 billion GB, reflecting a 17.7% year-on-year increase. In June alone, the average monthly mobile internet data usage per user (DOU) reached 23.57 GB/user/month, up by 13.6% year-on-year.

Evidently, the sustained and substantial growth in data consumption by users has not translated into a corresponding revenue boost for operators. On the contrary, fierce market competition within the industry has driven down the average charge per unit of data. The escalating costs of base station maintenance and bandwidth expansion, necessitated by increased data consumption by users, have far outstripped the revenue growth generated by data services.

The telecommunications industry has now bid adieu to the era of extensive growth propelled by user scale and has officially entered a period of profound transition pains as it shifts towards new growth drivers.