Chunghwa Telecom Co (CHT, 中華電信) yesterday said it is boosting expenditure on deploying new undersea cables this year to as much as NT$2 billion (US$60.9 million) to meet customer demand, enhance operational resilience, and avert natural disasters and geopolitical risks.
The nation’s biggest telecom plans to install two new submarine cables — Southeast Asia-Japan Cable 2 (SJC2) and Apricot — in the first half of this year, Chunghwa Telecom chairman Alex Chien (簡志誠) said yesterday.
The company is also in talks with potential partners to deploy multiple new submarine cables, Chien said.
Photo: Wang Yi-hung, Taipei Times
“As long as those [undersea cables] connect Taiwan to Southeast Asia or Pacific nations, we would be interested in investing,” he said.
The SJC2 submarine cable system spans 10,500km, connecting 11 cable landing stations in Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, South Korea and Japan.
Apricot is a 12,000km cable system connecting Japan, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore.
In addition to new cables, the company is also allocating money to repair two damaged domestic undersea cables that connect Taiwan and Lienchiang County (Matsu). The cables were apparently damaged by Chinese ships last month, it said.
The company plans to allocate 25.2 percent more expenditure on the non-mobile segment this year, including the construction of submarine cables to support its business expansion into artificial intelligence (AI) and AI data centers, while spending on the mobile-related segment would shrink 13.3 percent, it added.
Overall, the company plans NT$32.36 billion of capital expenditures this year, up 12.3 percent from NT$28.82 billion last year.
In addition to undersea cables, CHT is mulling introducing more medium Earth orbit satellites and high Earth orbit satellite Internet services this year to help the government and large enterprises to protect their data when submarine cables are damaged, Chien said.
CHT last year inked agreements with OneWeb and SES to provide low and medium Earth orbit satellite services.
Net profit this year is forecast to shrink by 0.3 percent to 3.4 percent to between NT$45.3 billion and NT$46.72 billion compared with last year. Earnings per share would be in the range from NT$4.62 to NT$4.82, the company said.
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