China Unicom, the Shanghai-listed body of China's second largest telecom company, said Friday its net profits in the first half of 2004 rose 20.25 percent to 1.57 billion yuan (about 190 million US dollars.)

Its cellular CDMA business earned money for the first time since operation, posting a 30-million-yuan (some 3.6 million US dollars) operational profit, compared with 590-million loss last year, said the company's mid-year report.

The operating revenue of CDMA soared by 60.7 percent year on year to 11.23 billion yuan (approximately 1.35 billion US dollars),contributing 34 percent of the company's total income.

Revenue of GSM business, China Unicom's other main service, stood at 35.3 billion yuan, up 15.9 percent, but the profit was down 5.1 percent to 3.7 billion yuan.

"The CDMA network has been greatly expanded and service quality has improved in every respect," said the report, crediting the completion of the third phrase of the CDMA network.

The report also highlighted the CDMA '1x' value-added services,which China Unicom said would be the focus of the company in the latter half of the year.

The company's Hong Kong-listed arm released its mid-year report a day earlier, saying its net profits grew by 17.8 percent to 2.81 billion yuan.

China Unicom had more than 102.51 million subscribers at the end of June, about one third of the mobile phone users in China. China Unicom is the world's third largest telecom company in subscriber population, and the second largest CDMA provider.

Source: Xinhua