Welcome to PCCW 2022 interim results analyst briefing. Our presenters today are Ms. Susanna Hui, Acting Group Managing Director and Group Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Marco Wong, Head of Investor Relations.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining our interim results for PCCW 2022. As I'm sure you recall, the first half of the year was earmarked by the onset of the fifth wave, with return to lockdowns, social distancing rules, and Hong Kong borders remain relatively shut. All these lead to a relatively weak economic environment. In spite of these headwinds, we managed to sustain our operations and growth for the period. With our OTT Viu business remaining one of the leading video streaming players in the region, and we achieved EBITDA breakeven for the first time since launch. Our ViuTV business sustained its growth in terms of viewership and revenue, with high-quality content and attracted increasing viewers and advertisers.
Our solutions also demonstrated revived growth in the business, and I'm sure you have already been made aware that we have today completed our strategic partnership transaction with Lenovo, and we believe that this will launch our growth across the region as well. On the OTT front, we again sustained our growth trajectory, hitting $100 million in the first half on the top line. Revenue CAGR achieved was 22%, and EBITDA breakeven for the first time.
If we look at the MAU and the paid sub and also the streaming minutes, basically, we are able to report consecutive periods of ranking number one in terms of the MAU, and also ranking number three in terms of the paid subscribers, and also ranking number two in terms of streaming minutes. For the first six months, we are able to report MAU of around 60.7 million in total, representing a 23% growth. In terms of paid subscribers, we also achieved a significant 31% growth from seven million to nine million. In terms of our content strategy, we are trying to do a two-pronged strategy.
Basically, we are still riding on the popularity of the Korean content as the regional content and obviously, it has been a very competitive landscape, and the cost is getting more and more expensive. At the same time, we are trying to expand our local content in collaboration with the local production houses in the different markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and so on to produce locally relevant content. During the period, we launched a number of new Viu Original titles, including top brand titles such as Pretty Little Liars 2 in Indonesia, which was also dubbed in Thai and Tagalog. We also had She Was Pretty in Malaysia and Remember 15 in Thailand and a lot of these were charted, one of the top ten titles as well.
On the free TV side, our free TV, ViuTV continued its momentum with growth in both primetime ratings, which increased by 24%, as well as we see an increase in terms of our Viu app downloads, which grew by 19% during the period, bolstering our reach to younger and digitally savvy viewers as well. Despite the very weak macro environment in Hong Kong, we were able to see advertising revenue expanding continuously by 33% in the first six months as we continue to expand our advertiser base, adding more than 200 new accounts during the first half.
Overall, in terms of content, for the media business, we have lined up our productions across a wide categories of genres, including drama, variety, documentary, and partnering with well-known and successful local and regional producers in terms of movies as well. This will be able to have content IP on our side, which enable us to explore, basically, monetization outside of the Hong Kong platform, but also to the overseas market as well. Moving along to our PCCW Solutions, we see revived growth during the first half, as the enterprises and also the public sector restarted and accelerated the IT projects and spending. The pie chart here shows that the telecom and public sectors continue to be the main revenue contributors in Hong Kong and Singapore to our solutions business.
In terms of the revenue by services, application development and maintenance, together with the digital and cloud solutions, represented over 70% of our revenues. Further project wins in Hong Kong and Singapore add to our secure orders of $3.1 billion as at June end. Moving along to our talent, I think one of the core assets of our solution business is, of course, our talent. We have embarked on a number of initiatives to grow and nurture our talent.
We signed a MOU during the first half with City University of Hong Kong and working very closely with them to recruit students and graduates, as well as partnering with faculty such as data science to develop smart city solutions. We also implemented a talent development program that resulted in us recruiting over 100 university graduates for the first six months, where they will be trained and mentored with extensive learning opportunities so that they can become the future leaders. On this slide, we can see some of the case references in our different markets including the Airport Authority Hong Kong in Hong Kong, where we provide automated transportation solutions to improve the flow of passengers and traffic.
Another example in the China market is our project with China Mobile to roll out nationwide planning management system to provide business visibility and operational efficiency in China. Of course, in China, we also have expanded our delivery capability in the Greater Bay Area, in particular Shenzhen and so on, to help also fill up our talent pool. In Singapore, we are partnering with numerous government agencies to provide full suite of managed IT services. There will be an upselling opportunity as well, which would of course contribute to higher revenue going forward. Today we are pleased to report that we have completed our transaction in terms of partnership with Lenovo. An announcement has been made today as well.
This would enable us to further expand across the region, which we believe create an Asia-Pacific IT powerhouse to address the fast-growing regional IT services market. The partnership combines Lenovo's global footprint in more than 180 markets, broad portfolio of end-to-end solutions, solid pedigree in terms of innovation and strong go-to-market and delivery capabilities. With our solutions business strength in system integration and application development, operational expertise, and highly skilled talent pool, the partnership will be able to provide one-stop customer solutions that integrate IT services, device, and digital infrastructure to address complex IT issues and also transformation needs of customers across the region.
The solutions business in Hong Kong will remain dedicated and fully committed to delivering digital and managed services for our existing customers in Hong Kong, in particular, for those in the public sector. With that, performance in terms of the different business units, the board has earlier recommended an interim dividend of HKD 0.0956 per share, which represents an increase of 2.14% year-on-year. This is in line with HKT's distribution growth announced yesterday in terms of the first half. The idea is to have the dividend growth align with the HKT dividend growth as well.
Full year, we are looking at maintaining a close to 100% or 100% pass-through of the dividends we receive from HKT. With that, I would like to pass the floor to Marco Wong, our Head of IR, to share with you the financial highlights.
Thanks, Susanna. Turning to the financials, PCCW delivered a steady performance across all its lines of business for the first half despite the challenging environment. Service revenue was up by 3% to HKD 2.176 billion. Including handset sales, revenue was up by 1% to $2.341 billion. EBITDA was up by 5% to HKD 742 million. As you can see, profit reduced down to $11 million. As you can see in the tables below, all the lines of business registered growth.
As announced yesterday, HKT grew 3% to HKD 2.071 billion, of which service revenue was up by 5% to HKD 1.906 billion, mainly due to strong local data revenue growth and broader 5G adoption. The EBITDA for HKT increased by 2%, driven by similar increase in EBITDA for TSS and mobile. AFF also grew by a healthy 2% to HKD 305 million. With PCCW's 52% shareholding in HKT, it will receive a dividend of approximately $159 million. If we look at the individual businesses in PCCW, on the OTT side, it registered strong growth of 22% to $101 million.
The first time it's surpassed HK$100 million in terms of revenue. This was spurred by growth on the video side with 23% growth. As mentioned earlier by Susanna, this growth was driven by growth in MAUs to 60.7 million, and paid subscribers to 9.1 million, which led to growth in both advertising revenue as well as subscription revenue. The content that Viu produced also allowed international syndication revenue opportunities. On the back of the enlarged revenue base, OTT achieved positive EBITDA for the first time of $2 million, compared to a loss of $3 million in the last six months of last year, demonstrating initial operating leverage.
On the free TV side, revenue increased by 52% to $50 million, despite the challenges of the weak macro environment. This was driven by growth in advertising revenue to $32 million, which was driven by a growing base of returning and new advertisers who are attracted by our primetime ratings increase, as well as our digitally savvy and younger viewer segment, as evidenced by the 9% increase in app downloads. As a result of the growth in both viewership as well as revenue, EBITDA was a positive $10 million. This represents ViuTV's second consecutive six-month period of positive EBITDA. We also look forward to broadcasting the World Cup in the second half of this year, which should also boost viewership.
On the solutions side, total revenue was up by 2% to $327 million, and this was driven by progress and completion of IT projects in Hong Kong as well as Southeast Asia. Specifically, recurring revenue increased by 9% to $226 million. Secured dollars were steady at $3.1 billion, as we had new project wins, contract wins in both Hong Kong as well as Singapore. EBITDA increased by 35% to $48 million, with margin improving from 11% to 15% due to better productivity. As we announced earlier, the strategic partnership with Lenovo has been completed, and we look forward to that driving further growth in the solution business.
On the OpEx side, we saw an increase on the IT solutions side to support business expansion. As we mentioned yesterday, the HKT OpEx declined largely due to operating efficiencies. As a result, the OpEx-to-revenue ratio improved to 14%. In terms of CapEx, the CapEx-to-revenue ratio declined to 6.6%, largely due to HKT's efficiency in CapEx as we completed the rollout of the 5G network, while CapEx for media and solutions business remained steady. Turning to the capital structure, we see that on the HKT side, you can see at the top, we don't have any outstanding debt maturity this year, and the gross debt was stable at $5.69 billion.
At the bottom of the slide, you see PCCW. We refinanced 300 million in bonds that were due in the first half with bank facilities, and as a result, this should result in some interest savings. Across the group, we have a balanced mix of short-term as well as longer-term bonds, and the current ratio of fixed to floating is 60/40, which will help us insulate from any potential future interest rate increases. Average debt maturity is around four years, and the effective interest rate was 2.7%. In terms of liquidity, extremely healthy at $3 billion, consisting of $307 million in cash and $2.6 billion in undrawn credit.
HKT accounted for about HKD 1.8 billion of this liquidity. Core gross debt to EBITDA as of June 2022 was 3.97x , and core net debt to EBITDA was 3.73x . With the cash that we've just received from the strategic partnership with Lenovo, we expect to pay down debt with that, and as a result, improve the overall credit leverage. That ends the presentation. Thank you.
That's the end of our presentation today. Thank you for watching.