CITIC Securities: Telecommunications capital expenditure continues to tilt towards the computing power network direction, focusing on opportunities such as 5G-A, digital communication optical fibers, and fiber optic access.

CITIC Securities said that according to the financial reports of the three major operators at the beginning of the year, the capital expenditure guidance for the three major operators in 2025 is expected to decrease by 9.1% to 289.8 billion yuan, and overall investment expenditure will continue to shrink, with investment focus continuing to tilt towards computing power. According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in the first half of 2025, the cumulative mobile internet traffic reached 186.7 billion gigabytes, an increase of 16.4% year-on-year, with the year-on-year growth rate increasing month by month since 2025. Suggestions for attention: 1) Accelerate the large-scale deployment of 5G-A, and speed up the research and development of 6G technology; 2) AI-driven new types of optical fiber demand growth within/between data centers, with accelerated applications of multimode fibers, etc.; 3) Optical fiber access deployment entering a mature stage, gigabit optical network broadband construction steadily advancing, beginning to upgrade to "10-gigabit".