Nomura raises target prices for three major Chinese telecom stocks and upgrades China Unicom's rating to "Buy"

Nomura published a report indicating that the growth of the telecommunications industry in mainland China slowed in the first quarter, with service revenue growing by 0.7% year-on-year, and a growth of 1% year-on-year in the first four months of this year. China Mobile (00941.HK), China Telecom (00728.HK), and China Unicom (00762.HK) grew by 1.4%, 0.3%, and 2.1% year-on-year, respectively.

Nomura believes that core businesses, including mobile and broadband, continue to be under pressure due to a saturated consumer market and increasing competition. Emerging businesses such as IDC are maintaining healthy growth due to DeepSeek's LLM and other Gen AI applications in AI cloud applications.

In the first quarter, China Telecom's IDC revenue reached 9.5 billion RMB (the same below), growing by 10.4% year-on-year, while China Unicom's IDC revenue grew by 8.8% year-on-year to 7.2 billion RMB during the same period. Looking ahead to the 2025 fiscal year, the bank expects capital expenditures to continue to decline to maintain cash flow and rising dividends. At the same time, it upgraded China Unicom's H-share rating to "Buy" and raised the target prices for the three major Chinese telecommunications stocks, as detailed in another table