Determined to Build a Smart City in Macau Despite Challenging Times
(May 11, 2020 – Hong Kong) CITIC Telecom International Holdings Limited (“CITIC Telecom”) has been the major shareholder of CTM since 2013 and has been fulfilling our commitment to invest, to build and to serve Macau. We fully support CTM by increasing the scale of our investment, optimizing network quality, enhancing service quality and coping with development needs on the overall telecommunication services in Macau.
In the beginning of the year, the outbreak of the COVID-19 has caused huge impact economically and socially. CITIC Telecom and CTM are well aware of our responsibilities as the telecommunication operator and we have devoted ourselves in the anti-epidemic work. Demand for network service, especially network bandwidth, has risen as communities across Macau stayed home according to government’s advice. Maintaining high-quality network services has been the development focus for CTM, to fulfill the development needs across Macau and the quality of our services has always been the top priority for CTM, especially during the epidemic.
A lot of the SMEs and micro-enterprises in Macau are bearing the impact of the outbreak, CTM has deployed its resources to support them during this difficult time, measures include free online sales platform, free cloud storage services etc in order to help retailers to maintain their business through online sales platform and support the digital transformation of SMEs and micro-enterprises.
CTM provides a number of content services for free to residents in Macau as they were urged by the government to stay home. In addition, CTM has taken proactive initiatives to provide mobile data services for free for those who returned from overseas and were placed under medical surveillance.
At the same time, CTM has overcome various difficulties, with the support of the Macau SAR government. CTM strives to launch 5G services in parallel with the neighboring regions, has been carrying out 5G network construction work according to our plan, with the goal to create a favorable network in order to achieve economic recovery promptly after the epidemic.
While fulfilling our responsibilities for the society, as a company deeply rooted in Macau, CTM has been striving to ensure the health and safety of all staff and their families, for the sustainable development of CTM.
During the outbreak, CITIC Telecom witnessed the strong will of CTM staff in ensuring the smooth running of the telecommunications network in Macau, they have worked endlessly with tremendous efforts to ensure normal network operation during the outbreak.
The anti-epidemic work in Macau has achieved satisfactory results with the effective measures and strong determination of the Macau SAR government, in addition to the support and cooperation from all sectors across Macau. We are proud to be involved and made our contributions, we are confident on the development of Macau once the epidemic is over.
CITIC Telecom and CTM have been listening carefully to all comments and suggestions from all sectors to fulfil our corporate social responsibilities proactively. In the last seven years, CTM has made proactive suggestions for 9 times, to offer various initiatives to reduce price on a wide range of services and also introduced diversified services packages. Since the acquisition, we have consistent investments and as a result the network quality was improved significantly. A number of network performances and indexes was certified by third-party professional institutions with world-class quality. In the “Measuring the Information Society Report” published by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Macau was ranked as one of the world’s cheapest countries and regions under the internet service expenditure and household income proportion ranking, in which on mobile broadband charges, Macau was top of the rank and the second under fixed-line broadband charges. The report reflects the growing popularity of the use of information technology in Macau through the joint efforts of CTM and other stakeholders.
CITIC Telecom will, as always, support the development of Macau’s telecommunications services and will provide quality services for enterprises and citizens in Macau, together we will overcome the challenge brought forth by the epidemic. Especially now is the critical time for digital development and we will focus on the long-term development for Macau. We will continue to increase our investment and speed up the 5G construction in order to build a world-class smart city in Macau in reward of the trusts and support from all walks of life in Macau.