• China Mobile needs a new CEO
• Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony achieve financial firsts
• Swisscom highlights importance of sovereign AI

In today’s industry news roundup: China Mobile’s CEO resigns with immediate effect and without a successor being identified; Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile reports its first full year of positive EBITDA while its vendor sister Rakuten Symphony records its first operating profit; Swisscom highlights its expansion into AI services in Switzerland and Italy as it reports its full year results; and much more!

He Biao has unexpectedly resigned as CEO of China Mobile, the world’s largest operator in terms of customer numbers (1 billion mobile and 329 million fixed broadband users) with immediate effect because of “work reassignment”, the telco announced, with the company seemingly trying to ensure investors that there is nothing untowards related to his swift departure. “Mr He has confirmed that there is no disagreement with the board and there is no matter relating to his resignation that needs to be brought to the attention of the shareholders of the company,” noted China Mobile, which has not announced a successor. He Biao was appointed as CEO in April 2024, replacing CFO Li Ronghua who had been sitting as interim following the resignation of previous chief Dong Xin – now at China Unicom – in January 2024.

Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile, which recently announced it had reached 10 million connections, recorded full year 2025 revenues of 374.7bn yen ($2.45bn), up by 32％ year on year, “driven by expanding subscriber numbers and higher ARPU [average revenue per user],” its parent company Rakuten Group announced in this earnings highlights release. As a result, Rakuten Mobile managed its first full year of positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA), at 12.9bn yen ($84m). Rakuten Group also announced that Rakuten Symphony, which is Rakuten’s telecom and cloud sector vendor and systems integration arm and which now has 74 customer relationships, “achieved full-year non-GAAP [adjusted] operating profit for the first time since founding,” and recorded full year revenues of $571.3m.   

Swisscom highlighted the importance of AI in its full year earnings announcement, in which it stated it had met its targets even though revenues and earnings dipped slightly on a like-for-like basis. It noted: “Artificial intelligence unlocks enormous opportunities. Swisscom is consistently expanding its investments in innovative AI solutions in order to support residential and business customers with intelligent, secure and sustainable services… Since the launch of the ‘Swiss AI Platform’, companies in Switzerland have benefitted from a high-performance infrastructure for trustworthy AI applications. In Italy, Fastweb + Vodafone reinforces its leading role in the country’s digital transformation, providing businesses and public authorities with a sovereign European AI platform in the form of the FastwebAI Suite.”

BSS newcomer Totogi continues to gain traction with service providers: The vendor’s Ontology system has been selected by Singapore operator StarHub to “transform enterprise sales calls into executable, high-quality leads,” Totogi has announced. According to Totogi, “conversation intelligence platforms can capture what was said on a call, but they cannot determine whether the opportunity can be sold, priced, fulfilled or billed,” whereas Totogi Ontology “encodes telco operations: Product constructs, pricing logic, eligibility rules, fulfillment workflows. When a representative discusses a customised enterprise bundle, the system knows immediately whether it is sellable, at what price and through which path – because the ontology already understands what StarHub can deliver.”

AST SpaceMobile, which is building a constellation of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites that will provision direct-to-device (D2D) services for its mobile operator partners, has completed the unfurling of what it calls the “largest commercial communications array antenna ever deployed in low-earth orbit” with its BlueBird 6 satellite. “Spanning approximately 2,400 square feet, the satellite is engineered to support peak data speeds of up to 120 Mbit/s with plans to deliver up to ten times the bandwidth capacity of the BlueBird 1-5 series,” stated the company, which is on track to launch between 45 and 60 satellites by the end of 2026, in this announcement. “The aperture enables full 4G and 5G cellular broadband services, including voice, data and video to standard, unmodified smartphones everywhere,” it added.  

Comcast has agreed to a $117m payout to settle a class action suit claiming the US cable company failed to protect its customers’ sensitive data during a 2023 cyber attack. A US federal judge in Pennsylvania has given preliminary approval to settle the case, filed by a plaintiff named as Kenneth Hasson, which could benefit up to 31.6 million customers who were sent individual notifications about the data breach that was first reported in December 2023. Under the terms of the settlement, Comcast will provide up to three years of free financial and credit monitoring and identity theft protection, plus a reimbursement for “out-of-pocket losses and lost time” of up to $10,000 per claimant. 

– The staff, TelecomTV