File photo/NBD

On March 22, China Telecom (SH.601728, HK.00728) released its 2022 annual financial report. 

The report shows that in 2022, China Telecom's operating revenue was RMB 475 billion, showing an increase of 9.4% year-on-year. Of that, service revenue was RMB 434.9 billion, representing an increase of 8.0% year-on-year. Net profit was RMB 27.6 billion, delivering an increase of 6.3% year-on-year.

As of the market close on March 22, China Telecom's Hong Kong shares closed at HK$4.21 per share, up 1.69%, pushing the year-to-date increase to 37.13%. The telecom carrier's A-shares closed at RMB 6.70 per share, up 1.21%, with the year-to-date increase being 59.90%.

At the performance meeting held on the same day, the company said that in 2022, revenue from e-Surfing Cloud doubled again to reach RMB 57.9 billion yuan, and the company expects to increase the figure to around RMB 100 billion in 2023. e-Surfing Cloud has become the world's largest operator cloud and China's largest hybrid cloud, and ranked third in China's public cloud IaaS and public cloud IaaS+PaaS segments in terms of market share.  

When asked about the impact of ChatGPT on China Telecom, Shao Guanglu, president and chief operating officer of China Telecom, said that ChatGPT will bring about an explosive growth in computing power, which means two opportunities for China Telecom. 

Shao said that first, the company can provide computing services for generative AI startups. e-Surfing Cloud has the initial ability to provide computing power for large models with hundreds of billions of parameters. Second, the company will strengthen its role in industrial AI development. In terms of computer vision and AI detection, it has had more than 200 core algorithms and more than 5,000 long-tail algorithms. The company has more than 400 AI research and development personnel.