Earnings Labs

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. (CHT)

Q3 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 6, 2025

$43.51

-0.21%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Chunghwa Telecom Conference Call for the company's Third Quarter 2025 Operating Results. [Operator Instructions] And for your information, this conference call is now being broadcasted live over the Internet. A webcast replay will be available within an hour after the conference is finished. Please visit CHT IR website at www.cht.com.tw/ir under the IR Calendar section. And now I would like to turn it over to Ms. Angela Tsai, Vice President of Financial Department. Thank you. Ms. Tsai, please begin.

Cho-Fen Tsai

Analyst

Thank you. I'm Angela Tsai, Vice President of Finance at Chunghwa Telecom. Welcome to our third quarter 2025 results conference call. Joining me on the call today are Chunghwa's President, Rong-Shy Lin; and our Chief Financial Officer, Audrey Hsu. During today's call, management will begin with sharing our recent strategic achievements and provide an overview of our third quarter business results. This will be followed by a discussion of our segment performance and financial highlights. We will then open the floor for questions and answers. Please turn to Slide 2 to review our disclaimers and forward-looking statement disclosures. Now without further delay, I will turn the call over to President. President Lin, please go ahead.

Rong-Shy Lin

Analyst

Thank you, Angela, and hello, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter 2025 results conference call. Extending the outperforming results of this first half, we continue to beat the financial guidance in the third quarter. Our revenue, operating income, net income and EPS all exceeded the upper end of our forecast. Third quarter revenue hit its highest level since 2017, reflecting the robust growth in our core business and extending ICT services. ICT revenue alone set a new third quarter record, the highest since 2021. As Taiwan's telecom market continued to develop healthy, we are confident in our full year financial results and supported by our leadership across all business segments. For our midterm to long-term development, we believe that group expansion of -- and AI-related initiatives are critical, and we have taken proactive steps. In this area, we are pleased to see our cybersecurity subsidiary, a Chunghwa Telecom Security, successfully complete its public listing in September with International Integrated Systems soon to follow in its upcoming IPO. Moreover, in October, we launched InventAI, a new subsidiary spun off from our research division, dedicated to monetizing AI innovation. Our AI capabilities have received significant recognition and honors. On the global stage, our first self-developed Vision-Language Model technology secured first place in the transportation category at the Global AI City Challenge, a prestigious international competition co-organized by NVIDIA and a leading university worldwide. This recognition was earned through our technology, superior accuracy and predictive capabilities in analyzing highly complex traffic scenario. In Taiwan, we hold the largest portfolio of AI-related patents in the industry, far ahead of our peers, serving as a solid base for future development. We are proud of these achievements and remain committed to maintaining our competitive advantages. Our technology expertise and resilient network have also created social value…

Wen-Hsin Hsu

Analyst

Thank you, President. Good afternoon. Please turn with me to Slide 12, income statement highlights, where I will cover our performance for the third quarter and first 9 months of 2025. The third quarter demonstrates strong execution and profitability. First, let's look at the top line. Revenue reached TWD 57.92 billion. This achieved a significant milestone of the highest third quarter revenue level in 9 years. This represents a solid 4.2% increase compared to the same period last year. This growth was primarily fueled by the successful expansion of our ICT business and also robust sales growth, while our core telecom service maintained positive momentum. Our strong operating performance is clearly reflected in our bottom line. Income from operations rose by 6.4% and net income increased 4.8% year-over-year. This performance was supported by steady growth across our mobile service and fixed broadband business, alongside the expansion of a high-value service, including Internet data center, IDC and cloud service. As a result of this performance, earnings per share increased from TWD 1.16 to TWD 1.22. This reflects consistent profitability and marks the highest third quarter EPS in 8 years. This operational efficiency also resulted in a strong quarter for EBITDA, which recorded a 4% gain, reaching TWD 22.11 billion for the quarter. The EBITDA margin of 38.17% was virtually in line with the 38.23% recorded in quarter 3 last year. This demonstrates sustained cash generation. So now moving now to our year-to-date performance through the first 9 months. Please focus on column 5 through 7 for the results. So revenue grew by 3.5% year-over-year, supported by strong momentum in our ICT portfolio and the sales contribution from our subsidiary, Chunghwa Precision Test Tech. Reflecting its top line strength, income from operations and net income rose 5.5% and 4.2%, respectively, primarily fueled…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

Cho-Fen Tsai

Analyst

okay. We got one question from the dashboard. The question is that what is the driver of our international projects business? Okay. For international business, just as we mentioned that in the international markets, besides that, Chunghwa can play a role in the global AI supply chain. So actually, we see great potential of opportunities in the market of United States. So now our subsidiary in the United States are doing the project in Texas in those states that a lot of Taiwan high-tech company relocate there to do some plant construction and most of them are -- play a very important role for the AI supply chain globally. And in the Japan market, we also see similar opportunities in Japan, right? And in addition to that, we also try to introduce our self-development solutions to the global market. So for this quarter, our subsidiary, the CHT Security, their cybersecurity services, we successfully introduced the services to Southeast Asian markets and in Japan, okay, with the collaboration of our subsidiaries in Singapore and in Japan. For the Southeast Asia company, we also see the opportunities from the high-tech companies. That's the main driver of the business growth in Southeast Asia company. And we also try to introduce the smart city-related projects there. So in the third quarter, we see that we successfully introduced our Smart Pole project there. Although we want to notice that the Smart Pole is mainly developed and we introduced our in-house solutions, and we also collaborate with the partners to make it successful in Thailand.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] There seems to be no further questions at this moment. I will turn it over to President Lin. Please go ahead.

Rong-Shy Lin

Analyst

Okay, everyone. Thank you very much for your participation. See you. Bye-bye.

Operator

Operator

Yes. Thank you, President Lin. And ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for your participation in Chunghwa Telecom's conference. There will be a webcast replay within an hour. Please visit CHT IR website at www.cht.com.tw/ir under the IR Calendar section. You may now disconnect. Thank you again, and goodbye.