Where did 20 million Chinese telephone customers go? That is the conundrum for investors in the country's three big telcos, who lost a record number of users in February. The explanations go from the crazy to the most plausible. Neither is particularly reassuring.
It may not seem that bad. After all, the number of subscribers of the three fell from 1,600 million in January to 1,580 million in February. For China Mobile, by far the largest with more than 900 million accounts, a net loss of more than 7 million seems like a rounding error. Still, it dwarfs the fall of January, 860,000. It is also the first time that all three have recorded losses of mobile users at the same time, in at least a decade.
Not surprisingly, conspiracy theorists were quick to link it to the virus, suggesting that it might reveal the actual number of deaths. China Unicom chief Wang Xiaochu thinks it is due to customer account cancellations with multiple accounts. Sounds more likely. Many quarantined consumers may be inclined to use Wi-Fi instead of the extra data plans of normal mobile accounts. But given the number of people confined, the number of accounts lost under that assumption could have been much higher.
Other sensible reasons are the return of migrant workers to their home provinces and the abandonment of their phone plans. A Hong Kong post speculated it had to do with the so-called water army: fake accounts deployed by companies to gain users or receive good reviews, which could have taken a break during the pandemic.
Whatever the cause, it is not encouraging for investors. The small chance that it could signal the start of a behavior change is troubling. And if the decline is punctual, it will be one more reason to doubt the Chinese metrics. That there are more mobile clients, or monthly active users on WeChat, than the entire population of working age is another one of the great Chinese mysteries.
The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions are yours. The translation, by Carlos Gómez Abajo, is the responsibility of CincoDías
