We maintain the TP at HK$78.00 and the investment rating as "Buy". Given the margin of safety from the relatively high dividend yield rate, and new opportunities brought about by cloud and data factor market, we maintain the TP at HK$78.00 and the investment rating as "Buy". The TP represents 10.8x/ 10.0x/ 9.2x FY23-FY25 PER.
China Mobile's (the "Company") 1QFY23 results were in line with our expectations; earnings and dividend payout will continue to increase steadily. In 1Q23, Revenue increased by 10.3% yoy, of which service revenue increased by 8.3% yoy. DICT revenue grew significantly by 23.9% yoy. Shareholders' net profit increased by 9.5% yoy to RMB28.1 billion. The number of mobile subscribers and the number of wireline broadband subscribers increased by 7.75 million and 8.72 million, respectively, while the mobile ARPU and household customer blended ARPU increased yoy by 0.8% and 3.5%, respectively. We expect mobile customers and household broadband customers to still achieve net addition; we expect mobile ARPU to be basically stable while household broadband blended ARPU to grow yoy, promoted by smart home value-added services. Due to reduced depreciation pressure brought about by the slowdown of capital expenditure and the control of operation and maintenance expenses, we expect the growth of earnings to be higher than the growth of service revenue. In addition, we expect the Company to still raise its dividend payout ratio, and dividend payout ratio will be over 70% in 2023, thus growth in dividend payout will be higher than growth in earnings.
We expect the development of cloud and data factor to exceed market expectations. In 1Q23, China Mobile's DICT revenue was up 23.9% yoy to RMB29.4 billion. Although the Company plans to slightly reduce its CAPEX in 2023, especially in connectivity, it plans to raise CAPEX on computing force by 35% yoy. Large investments in cloud resources, combining the Company's channel advantages, cloud-network convergence, data security advantages and the continuous investment in core technologies, we expect cloud business to achieve continuous development. The Company has a large amount of high-quality data and has great advantages in data resources, so there will be great development opportunities and the Company will have good market position in the data factor market in the future. Currently, there are already some business cases on the ground, but data-related business is still in the very early stages of development; we believe that the Company will promote the development of data-related business from a strategic level, while the business model will also become more and more mature and enter more vertical industries to empower the digital transformation of various industries. Therefore, we expect that the data factor market will bring very large market opportunities for telecom operators.
Catalysts: Increase in dividend payout and dividend payout ratio; promotion of data factor-related business.
Risks: Slower-than-expected growth of cloud and data-related business; mismatch between investments and benefits.