Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Meng Shusen. I'm delighted today to be able to be with you once again today, and we are very grateful for your long-term support to China Unicom. On behalf of the management of the company, I welcome you earnestly to the 2024 annual results announcement. Today, we have two items. First of all, our Chairman would speak to us, and then the management would communicate with fellow media and analyst friends. During this process, the management would answer questions that are within the scope of the result announcement. If time allows, if time does not allow, and there are certain questions that you're interested in, we would follow up with those questions. We would conduct our result announcement in Putonghua, yet we provide English simultaneous interpreting. During this process, please turn your phone to mute or vibration mode.
Allow me to introduce to you those management and members of the board of directors that are with us today. First of all, Mr. Chen Zhongyue, Chairman and CEO. Mr. Jian Qin, Executive Director and President. Executive Director, Mr. Wang Junzhi. Senior Vice President, Mr. Tang Yongbo. Miss Li Yuzhuo, Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer, as well as Mr. Hao Liqian, Senior Vice President. Now, may I invite Mr. Chen Zhongyue, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, to walk us through 2024 company results? Mr. Chen, please. Respected analysts, investors, friends from the media, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome to the result announcement today. In 2024, China Unicom had focused on connectivity, communications, as well as computing and digital smart appliances on innovation and make certain breakthroughs. Our operating revenue had been growing steadily to RMB 389.6 billion. That's a 4.6% increase.
Our profitability has reached RMB 20.6 billion, and that is a 10.1% over the same period last year. Our return on equity has increased by 5.8%. As far as our CC is concerned, our subscriber base has reached new heights. Total mobile and broadband subscribers has reached 470 million, and the IoT connections is greater than 620 million. Internet of Vehicles has 76 million connections. Also, we have on our Gewu Industrial Network platform, we have access to over 12 million devices. That's one-eighth of the country's volume. We have a 17.1% increase in our Unicom cloud revenue at RMB 68.6 billion. Data center revenue is RMB 25.9 billion at a 7.4% increase. Net contract value of intelligent computing businesses exceeded RMB 26 billion. Thanks a lot for your support. Upcoming, let me walk you through our three areas of innovation and our main results.
First of all, network innovation. We have been building a new infrastructure in a quality way. We insist on a very accurate investment strategy to deepen our integration and push forward for intelligent operation on an overall scale. We have reached an international as well as domestic integration in 2024. Our CapEx was at RMB 61.37 billion. That is a year-on-year decline or reduction of 17%, of which 19% is on computing power. With a better quality network and more efficient computing, our CapEx has been saved by RMB 1.9 billion. That is a per-unit business energy consumption of 10% less than before. We have a mobile network population up by one percentage point, reaching a coverage of 99%. That is benefiting millions of subscribers. We also have broadband ports increased by 5%, reaching millions of households.
We have mobile network base exceeding 4.5 million in trains and various communities, reaching a very deep penetration. We also enlarged commercial use of 5G-A, and we have realized uploading 1 Gbps and downloading 10 Gbps speed, deployment of carrier aggregation in 300 cities. Also, RedCap is now enabled in over 150 cities. The proportion of 10G ports exceeded 80%, whereas the number of broadband ports is at 280 million. We focus on Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and took the lead to build over 10 Gbps cities. With this, we have been able to enlarge our capability and coverage. We accelerated the development from IDC to AIDC, and in Shanghai, Guangdong, Hong Kong, as well as in Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Guizhou provinces, we had built large-scale computing centers and had built over 300 integrated training and inference computing resource pools.
Total scale of intelligent computing exceeded 17 EFLOPS, and IDC cabinets are 420,000. We have been building 8 AINet hubs and 22 provincial nodes with computing power, intelligent network, AINet, and we also have a Xingluo computing power allocation platform. This is also an international network with more resources. We enhanced Asia-Pacific, Asia-Africa, and also our accessibility to other areas of the world. In Qingdao and in Haikou, we had built over 400 business units and more than 60 international marine and terrestrial cables into over 200 countries and regions. We also make use of Hong Kong data center in Hong Kong, as well as Tokyo, Singapore, Frankfurt to connect over 50 resource pools. We also provide high-quality computing network services to clients worldwide. Also technology innovation.
We deepen our artificial intelligence technology, data technology, information technology, communication technology, and operational technology to enhance our core capabilities. We also invest in our R&D. We have added on with an additional 9.1% increment in our R&D investment. 42% of our proportion of our team is of innovation talent, technically. 10% is in R&D. We also in the Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, the Greater Bay Area, as well as Yangtze River Delta, we built our innovation entities. We also established China Unicom Data Intelligence Company, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. Since last year, we have got a series of accolades. We were awarded the first prize in National Science and Technology Progress, as well as the GSMA Global Mobile Awards. Now, we also worked ahead on the next generation internet. We played a leading role in this area.
We pushed Internet 2030 basic protocols and system architecture. We also invested in wide area lossless transmission and internetwork computing power allocation, such key technologies. For the first time, we have exceeded over 3,000 km of lossless transmission and over 200 km of internetwork computing. This is a very high level of digital intelligent quality. In Qinghai, we built the Sanjiangyuan Park demonstrating integration of green power with intelligent computing. We have realized 10,000 accelerator green computing to achieve computing electricity integration. The cluster average utilization rate is more than 60%. We also worked on key technologies such as millimeter waves, multi-frequency sensing, and reconfigurable intelligence services. We also worked on Internet of Vehicles to realize ultra-low latency, high precision, position, and dense sensing. We also achieved key technology in internet technologies, and we have built in Anyang and Nanjing National Great Experimental Zones.
We also started on 6G experiment and certification to get ourselves prepared for the next generation of technology. We also worked on key technologies in the big, big data area to work on data sets, high-quality data sets, and also mature standards, advanced technology data platform. We also built a trusted data space platform, which is leading data governance and data security capabilities. We also built the UniAI platforms through key technologies such as adaptive slow thinking and a symmetric MoE architecture. We also work on leading multimodal technologies, especially as it works with UniAI MaaS platform and also over 1,000 industrial models. We also built over 1,000 automatic interpreting models. Thirdly, service innovation. We embraced AI to launch a series of new AI products and services to open up our market and create value and capabilities.
Our digital service is innovative, and we provide different smart services for different scenarios. We have 5G new calling, cloud phone, cloud computer, smart home tone robot, smart customer service AI agents, etc. We also connect Unicom Cloud Drive, video ringtone, Unicom UHD FTTR. We have over 180 million users in UniCloud, and we continue to promote integrated development, and our integrated subscribers is now at 77% with an integrated subscriber output exceeding RMB 100. We continue to build our intelligent upgrade to integrate AI model training, native storage, lossless network, and cluster coordination to provide different model intelligence services to provide a one-stop service. China Unicom, as the Harbin Asian Winter Games, we had secured for the first time telecom operators providing cloud and services during international sports events with millisecond levels, elastic resource allocation, and AI-driven traffic forecasting can reduce latency.
We also service the People's Daily in their coverage. We also had released the huge potential in media use of AI. With industrial internet, we are the first national A-level dual cross-platform Gewu industrial internet platform to put together 5G industrial internet projects, over 29,000 of it, and over 7,100 as 5G factories. We also have over 4,100 factories. We are leading both in market penetration as well as market share. We are building integrated platforms to deliver on city management on an integrated digital government basis. In 2024, our international business continues to grow, and our revenue is at RMB 12.5 billion. That's a 15.2% increase over last year.
In Saudi Arabia, Peru, UAE, and Uzbekistan, we had set up 40 global branches to serve over 10,000 international customers, especially in the globally integrated Internet of Vehicles, and also to assist Chinese companies to go abroad and to assist new energy cars. Last November, we had launched UniCom International brand and continue to accelerate on our international development and to enhance our international management capabilities. We also fulfill our corporate ESG responsibilities. We deepened our efficient use of energy. We also use clean energy, and we had been awarded national green computing centers in 22 countries. We also had a serving the society in the sense of 260,000 villages and 280 million users to serve the village by digital platforms. We also set up 8,000 business outlets to serve smart elderly assistance services centers.
We also work on corporate governance to shoulder our responsibility as a listed company. We had over 160 investors in events, and we are more open, more trustworthy, and more trusted. We had been received, we had been awarded with different accolades. This year, we had been included in the FTSE China A50 index, which would become effective this Friday. We are determined to share our returns with our shareholder. Based on the good results, we decide to enhance 5 percentage points of our dividend payout ratio. We also increase our dividend payout by 20.1% to RMB 0.4043. In the last year, we had been working on enhancing our quality, our efficiency, and our revenue, as well as our innovation. In 2025, our operation and our investment would also improve.
We anticipate that CapEx would be around RMB 55 billion, of which computing power would increase by 28% year on year. Also, with AI and important projects, we have made special budgets for these special projects. Thanks for your support. We will continue to push on our three areas of innovation and also to enhance our innovation momentum and to strengthen our capabilities and also to optimize our business structure, improve our operation efficiency, and enhance our brand image. We focus on creating more values for the society as well as for our investors. Thank you.