Good evening, welcome to the HKT 2022 annual results presentation. In attendance today, we have Mrs. Susanna Hui, Group MD, and Mr. Patrick Poon, Group CFO. We'll start with the presentation, followed by Q&A. With that, let me turn it to Susanna.
Good evening. Thank you for joining the briefing session of our annual result announcement. As we all experienced, 2022 was indeed a very challenging period for all of us. Not only did we suffer from the lingering impact of COVID, particularly hard hit by the fifth wave in the first quarter of last year. Any attempts in revitalizing the economy was derailed by the interest rate hikes in the second half. Despite all of these headwinds, HKT managed to deliver a very resilient performance for another year, with 2% growth in services revenue, 3% growth in EBITDA, 2.4% increase in AFF. We are pleased to announce that the board has proposed a final distribution of HKD 0.4315.
Together with the interim distribution, total distribution for the year will amount to HKD 0.7451, representing a growth of 2.4% with a very healthy yield of close to 7.2% based on today's closing share price. Turning first to our mobile business, it is very clear that if you look at our slide here, we continue to consolidate our market leadership position with net addition of 26,000 customers during the year. Postpaid customer base reached 3.323 million as at year-end, with postpaid churn rate stable at 0.8%, overcoming indeed the effects of the very soft Hong Kong economy last year, the wave of emigration that we experienced, especially in the first half, and also the intense competition throughout the market.
On the right-hand side, you can see that the three years of COVID have indeed taken a toll on our mobile services revenue. However, we saw initial signs of recovery towards the Q4 of last year, especially as the social distancing and quarantine regulations in Hong Kong were relaxed and borders reopened. Indeed, the full travel resumption in 2023 will be a welcoming catalyst for the rebound of our roaming revenue. In last year, despite the absence of roaming, ARPU still increased to HKD 188, benefiting from the expanding adoption of our 5G across our mobile customer base.
Looking ahead, we are very confident that the further 5G adoption and the return of the roaming revenue will be the dual growth engines for our mobile as we unwind the COVID headwind and accelerate growth in 2023. Our 5G customer base during the year crossed a key milestone, expanding to over 1 million customers, which represents almost 1/3 of our total base, obviously providing the required ARPU uplift. Future 5G take-up will be increasingly, in our view, driven by value-added applications, of which we believe AR/VR will be instrumental. This year, leveraging our sponsorship of the Kusama exhibition at M+ Museum, we developed AR lens application to help drive customer engagement, providing indeed very differentiating services to keep our brand at top of mind for customers, especially important for the 5G switches.
As for roaming revenue, with the initial opening of borders and relaxation of quarantine requirements, Q4 started to witness an increase in outbound travel, which contributed to a 41% surge of our roaming revenue in Q4 as compared to Q3. Outbound revenue total registered at 25% year-on-year growth. Of course, following the full reopening of borders in January, we witnessed a number of roamers reaching 76% of pre-COVID levels, and revenue correspondingly hitting almost 70% pre-COVID. We also observed that roamers were now much more discerning in choosing service providers that would provide convenient and reliable 5G, which works to our advantage. We are of course offering very flexible, high-quality 5G roaming packages at various popular overseas destinations, ranging from special China, Hong Kong, Macau plan, other destination plan, pre-purchase day passes, and our monthly VAS subscriptions.
Riding on the government's Hello Hong Kong campaign, and yesterday was a Happy Hong Kong campaign, we do see Hong Kong continue to host multiple large-scale international events in the year. We expect that roaming revenue will rebound significantly in 2023 to almost 60%-70% of the pre-COVID level. Turning to the next slide here. The metaverse is potentially the next iteration of how humans use the internet to connect, communicate, and transact in an immersive 3D virtual way. Of course, 5G, with its low latency and ultra-high speed capabilities, will demonstrate its relevance as the enabling infrastructure. With this in mind, we have started last year to establish our presence in the metaverse. We partnered with Sandbox to create a unique space, which we have called Futurera.
Currently, Futurera offers a variety of immersive games leveraging on our group IP by our sister company, ViuTV, using, for example, the popular game show, Be ON Game. We have also started on this platform a Web3 talent recruitment on the platform. Also to help drive customer awareness and engagement, we established Metaverse Academy to provide training through gamification. Hopefully, this will build a tech-savvy customer base that will attract quality partners, and we'll be able to monetize as Web3 applications span beyond gaming to across e-commerce, live entertainment, and even remote learning. To ensure we provide the best 5G user experience in Hong Kong, after completing the territory-wide coverage in 2022, we continue to enhance coverage in indoor areas as well as rural areas through deployment in the new 700 MHz band.
Which further boosts the indoor performance through utilizing the four by four MIMO technology. Obviously, yesterday, the budget gave us some good news in terms of the tax deductibility of the spectrum fee, which will be a plus to our cash flow going forward. As for high traffic locations such as the premium shopping malls and hospitals and popular F&B chains, we have continued to deploy additional indoor system and LampSite solutions to cater for traffic first. We are also the first operator to use dual C-band massive MIMO base stations, which can handle two bands, the 3.5 GHz and the 4.9 GHz on one single piece of equipment. This not only doubles speed and capacity, it also optimizes cell site architecture.
Which is important, particularly given the limited space in Hong Kong and also the high cost of rooftop cell sites in peculiar to the Hong Kong environment. Last but not least, we are very green conscious. We have taken steps to improve the operations of our network to reduce energy consumption, and also the impact on the environment. This includes the use of solar panels on our exchange buildings, natural cooling for cell sites, et cetera. Talking about our network, it is not just the 5G network that is important and unrivaled. In fact, we will have to reiterate that our network is only one part of our integrated network. At the center of this is the robust, unparalleled, extensive fiber infrastructure that we have built over the years, that we have invested over the years.
It is now extended to villages, remote areas, outlying islands, and new housing estates, obviously, which can now serve 98% of the Hong Kong households with the different broadband services as we deliver through a 100+ Gb carrier grade network infrastructure. If we can explain a little bit more through this slide, you can see that our IP backbone is already 1 Tb. The core network is more than 400+ Gb interconnect trunks with excess nodes of more than 100 Gb reaching directly to our customer's premise for 10+ Gb. Even the last mile is fiber. We are the only operator that can provide 10 Gb symmetric PON-based broadband services territory-wide. With our massive core network, we are ready to continue supporting the customer experience as future applications definitely will be more and more data-intensive.
Our network is already future-proof. During the year 2022, HKT Netvigator offers a diverse and complementary range of home broadband solutions to meet the varying needs of individuals and households, especially important when COVID brought about a permanent shift to a lot more digital activities at home. During the year, you can see from the slide here that we have launched Fiber- to- the- Room and the latest Wi-Fi 6E router, which can achieve over 1 Gb speeds to complement our 2.5 Gb PON service, and also flexible 5G wireless home internet options as well. All of these are to enable us to deliver high speed, low latency, exceptional stability of broadband into every corner of our home.
We are also conscious of the fact that there are a lot more multiple users in a single household. To that end, we provide multi-use broadband solutions such as 2 x 1 Gb and 4 x 1 Gb services. Which can provide the characteristics of dedicated bandwidth and individual public IP addresses to each of the individual users at home. We also have ultra-high speed multi-gigabit technology to provide 2.5 Gb and 10 Gb broadband speed for home surface and for home entertainment and gaming purposes. This is particularly important for people like the KOL on social media who are uploading, they're using their home media, home media studio to upload 8K video, VR, AR, and so on.
All of these high bandwidth applications which are getting more and more popular. We believe that there is no other service provider in Hong Kong which can match the breadth and quality of our Netvigator broadband. With that, you can see that during the year 2022, we continue to have broadband subscriber expansion with a net gain of 4,000 broadband subscribers to 1.465 million as at December 2022. Despite the emigration headwind that we experienced for the past couple of years.
We continue to see the demand for high speed and reliability for fiber to the home, which manifested itself in terms of continuous growth year-on-year by 3% to 969,000 subscribers, which represent a penetration of 65% of our total broadband base. Home Wi-Fi solutions also grew during the year, which provided ARPU uplift of HKD 99 and representing a penetration of 24% of our broadband base. Obviously, on top of we also provide these Wi-Fi and smart living solutions to wholesale to the properties developers in Hong Kong.
During the year, we secure an additional 46 new residential projects, which represents an increase of 35% year-on-year, the revenue of which will be spread over the coming two to three years as the project see itself to completion. Turning to the next slide is our pay- TV, Now TV. Obviously, there was a, you know, an operator recently surrendering its pay- TV license, and this has sparked certain debates on the viability of Pay TV and the proposition of pay- TV in general in the market, especially in the view of the competition from other OTT content and free content. For us, we believe that Now TV continues to offer a very unique proposition to both our audience as well as to our content partners.
Now TV indeed is a very dedicated IPTV platform that is integrated with the robust network infrastructure that we have talked about in the earlier slides. It can deliver a scalable and, more importantly, a very seamless, stable viewing experience, not just the traditional linear, but also personalized on-demand content across a number of devices. Seamless experience across big, the big TV screen for the family, as well as individually on smart devices such as handsets, tablets, laptops and so on, through our Now player app, as well as our Now E OTT service, which allows quite flexible packages of different content genres. In other words, we are already embracing the OTT technology.
Instead of fighting against it, we are embracing, we have already elevated ourselves out of the traditional pay- TV proposition. Of course, another point that I would like to share with all of you is that we do have the strength of our number one market share in both our broadband and mobile customer base, and this is a very loyal, premium customer base that we have. This obviously forms a base on which we can continue to provide and the potential Now TV customers, especially with our data analytics capabilities in-house. As you can see here, our co-paying customer base during the year 2022 continued to grow by 2%, reaching 1.4 million as at year-end.
Again, I have to stress that this is despite all of the, you know, the emigration, the statistics provided by the government in terms of people leaving Hong Kong and expatriates leaving Hong Kong and so on. We must have done something right in the sense that we are customer centric. We focus on three pillars of contents. For instance, sports is one of the most important content pillar. Worldwide pay- TV operations. You can see that the sports is also the number one content. We pride ourselves as a home of sports. We offer viewers the most popular football leagues from around the world, including Premier League, La Liga in Spain, Serie A in Italy, as well as a wide selection of sports including tennis, golf and badminton and so on.
Undoubtedly, the sporting highlight of the year was, of course, the World Cup, which helped to drive the advertising revenue for our Now TV by 52% growth, half-on-half. We also benefited from the very timely relaxation of the social distancing regulations in Q4, which drove the commercial subscription primarily from the bars, from the F&B outlets and so on, and also the shopping malls. Revenue was up by 22% half-on-half as well. This is the sports content. The other content pillar is catered for the family with kids segment. For this content, we have extended into the educational content as well as driving engagement with our younger demographic.
During the year, we extended the ecosystem with a new STEM learning content, as well as partnering with our own self-developed AI interactive robot learning for kids. We have also extended from online to offline engagement through the opening of a indoor playground on Island West called the Super U. The third co-pillar of content is general entertainment, including drama, movies, and so on. We are now a super aggregator providing an open platform via our smart Android system is set-top box at home, providing the largest library of entertainment programs.
We embrace the top-tier OTT partners onto the platform, obviously, including our own affiliate company, our own Yellow Viu and Blue Viu, as well as others, which provide exclusive Korean content, Chinese content, Asian drama series, as well as blockbuster movies, both local and Western, different factual entertainment, and so on. On top of that, we also have the exclusive MOOV content, MOOV concerts for our music lovers. What we provide is quite a different proposition, not the traditional pay- TV. Whether you need a pay- TV license or not is a different matter, but we have already outgrown ourselves to become a different proposition embracing OTT as well. Turning to our enterprise business.
Our enterprise business also had decent growth in the year 2022, having 3% growth in terms of global data. Obviously we continue to offer enterprises and public sector customers in Hong Kong. The growth should have been higher if not for the soft economy during the year, which saw contraction generally for the SME segment. Despite that, we continue to provide these smart and secure solutions to drive digital transformation. In the past, the verticals will be construction, hospitals, and so on. With the opening up of the world, we are also active in the airport, transportation industry, where we have developed solutions that can enhance the user experience and passenger safety.
We have also seen increased projects in terms of the hotel industries as the hotel operators start to prepare for the arrival of tourists. Our solutions provide them with the elevated experience for guests that can cater for increasingly digital needs, as well as applications for robotics and so on to help streamline operations during a period when there is generally shortage of labor. In the property management industry as well, including shopping malls, we have transformed the tenant experience and operations by developing smart apps for tenants to manage their requirements and also smart sensors and so on, IoT capability, AI capability to empower preventive maintenance and increase their operational efficiency. It's worth noting our performance in China as well.
I think in the past, we have talked about the potential growth of our connectivity in China, especially when we are following our Hong Kong customers into China, GBA area, and beyond. We have already given guidance in the past about reaching HKD 1 billion revenue in three years. We are pleased to report that during 2022, we achieved a growth of 57% for our China business, despite the periodic lockdown in the mainland. As we provide a lot of different solutions for the retail industry in Hong Kong, as well as the insurance industry in Hong Kong, to remotely manage their business in China. We continue to be confident that we'll be able to expand our product offerings and partnership in the market to further scale up the business here.
Looking at our PCCW global business, our international business, we continue to expand our international network to improve the service experience and to serve our carrier and enterprise customers outside Hong Kong and China. During the year, we have extended our infrastructure through investment in the PEACE and JUPITER cables, adding capacity in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and North Africa regions. To automate our service offering, we also have our Console Connect, which is a software-defined platform, which has connections to over 160 cloud zones, connecting over 850 data centers globally, which is growing very significantly during the year. Next slide would be our club, our loyalty program, which is at the center of our digital ecosystem.
As you can see here, during the year, we also expand our member base to over 3.7 million, a 5% growth year-on-year. We continue to provide a range of premium digital services evolving around club members. These include our club platform, which provide e-commerce, a wide array of merchandises. Actually last year, we saw non-iPhone GMV increase by 16%. We also are providing different embedded finance services, digital payments, insurance and so on, in this digital ecosystem. Also online travel packages, as well as our telemedicine DrGo. We recently announced a partnership with Agoda to enrich our offering of the travel services as more and more customers use the expanding portfolio of services of our club.
Eventually, we have this ambition to build a super app to offer a convenient and customized experience to our club members, and thereby creating a flywheel of increasing engagement and spending of our club members over our diversified portfolio of services provided. As announced during the recent budget, actually it was just yesterday, the government, the financial secretary has announced another round of CVS of HKD 5,000 to each of the Hong Kong citizen. We are very pleased to be able to participate again in this third round. Through the previous two rounds, we have already built a very sticky CVS customers.
With our large base of the Tap & Go members of over 3.6 million, we will continue to devise new packages to promote this CVS spending via our Tap & Go. Actually, if you look at the slide here, you can see that in terms of the merchant subscription of our point of sales terminal, it has now reached 8,000 subscriptions. Also, which represented an increase of 29% year-on-year. The transaction volume on the merchant side through our point of sales terminal jumped by 68% year-on-year. On the consumer side, the customer spending over our Tap & Go platform saw by 55% year-on-year as well.
We do see that this evolving spending habit of customers will continue and will continue to accelerate the digital spending behavior in Hong Kong. Turning to our DrGo. Last year, we also saw very strong growth with registered members continuing to grow, hitting 352,000. More importantly, we see a 15 x growth of the video consultations during 2022. Obviously, as I said last year, and, you know, all of us would remember, there was still a lot of inconvenience going out, seeing the doctors and so on. There was substantial growth, exponential growth, indeed, in terms of the video consultations.
We also have therefore seen additional doctors and medical service partners added to the platform, which now amount to over 130 doctors providing services and also 15 medical partners providing different GP, SP, psychology, and other Chinese medicine services on our DrGo. We have also opened a digital health store during the year to serve the wellness needs of members. We continue to explore new features, added new features onto our platform. Of note is that we launched the first of its kind in Asia AF tele-screening program, enabling our users to check their heart rhythm on our DrGo at any time.
This represents our initial foray into preventive care to promote the well-being of the general public, obviously with the aim of alleviating the burden on our public healthcare systems as well. The final two slides are for me is this the sustainable future and how HKT has always stood by the community. We continue to support our community during the COVID period, and we provide, by providing various free telecom services such as health hotlines, internet connection to the communication to the community isolation facilities, free services for DrGo. Also we are one of the donors supporting the Strive and Rise Programme by the CES, which is a program to support youth upward mobility.
Of note is that our own colleagues, more than 100 of them, have signed up as mentors as well. In terms of climate change, we would also like to share all of you that we continued our efforts in terms of building, combating climate change and building a sustainable futures. Details will be obviously covered by our ESG report, which will be out soon. We have been leveraging emerging technologies like AI, IoT, to provide energy management solutions to corporates and households. Also we have our Smart Charge EV charging service to promote green transport. We have also committed facilities of HKD 2 billion in terms of sustainability-linked facilities. All of these are our efforts in terms of contributing to a sustainable future.
In summary, we have demonstrated a very strong resilience in 2022 in our third year of COVID headwinds. Of course, we will continue to focus on delivering and expanding our broadband services, our mobile services, and also deliver synergies in terms of realizing savings. Supporting our consumer and enterprise customers, deploying the latest technologies to bolster Hong Kong as a smart cities. Also through our club loyalty program, enrich our super app digital ecosystem to deepen engagement with customers and merchant partners, as well as contribute to the development of a digital economy in Hong Kong. With that, I will pass to Patrick Poon, our CFO, to share with you the detailed financials. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Susanna. Let's recap our key financial lines for the full year 2022. Our AFF continued to show a solid growth of 2.4% year-on-year to $724 million. Our service revenue was up by 2% to $3.91 billion. The growth was driven by continuously strong broadband and local data connectivity demand, further momentum in 5G adoption and delivery of enterprise digital transformation project in both Hong Kong and Greater Bay Area. Including handset sales, the total HKT revenue was maintained at similar level as last year. Our total EBITDA for the year was up by 3% to $1.68 billion. Spurred by cost efficiency initiative achieved across the group, leading EBITDA margin expanded to 38%.
Our net profit after tax grew 2% to $628 million. Looking into the details of our TSS segments. From the chart on the right-hand side, you can see our local TSS service revenue grew by 1% year-on-year, reaching to $2.12 billion. In which local data and broadband services continued to be the key growth drivers. As mentioned by Susanna just now, the growing demand for our unique integrated fixed mobile solutions across different industries, incorporating 5G connectivity with smart city solutions like blockchain, AI, machine learning, and IoT in Hong Kong and Greater Bay, drove up our local data revenue by 3% year-on-year.
With the increasing adoption of digital services at home and ongoing hybrid work and education arrangement, especially in the midst of the fifth wave of COVID-19 last year, demand for our robust, high-speed, and reliable broadband network remains strong and increasing. As such, our broadband services revenue report a 2% year-on-year growth. Local data services revenue register a solid growth of 3%. Pay- TV service revenue also ramp up by 2% to $ 320 million, primarily driven by the exclusive broadcast of FIFA World Cup 2022, as well as our comprehensive and comparing world-class content to cater for different customer segments in Hong Kong.
If to include our international business, of which the revenue rose 7% year-on-year, driven by the demand in both voice and data services, our total TSS revenue increased by 2% to $3.07 billion. As a whole, TSS segment EBITDA has maintained a steady 2% growth to $1.2 billion, attributable to the continued operating efficiency and ongoing conscious cost control. TSS EBITDA margin was maintained at 30%, same as last year. Let's turn to our mobile business. Mobile services revenue rose 2% to $1.02 billion for 2022. Contributed by, firstly, the continued expansion of our post-pay customer base, now to 3.323 billion, a net gain of 26,000 year-on-year.
The higher 5G adoption with customer in use exceeding 1 million- 1.016 million, representing almost one-third of our total post-pay customer base, and also as well as the higher revenue contribution from mobile broadband and new enterprise solutions. Our post-pay exit ARPU grew by 1% or HKD 1 - HKD 188 at the end of the year. Handset sales slowed down by 8% year-on-year to HKD 465 million as a result of supply chain disruption and peak supply in 2021 from the delayed launch of popular handset models. Total mobile EBITDA grew 2% from HKD 613 million - HKD 627 million, of which mobile services EBITDA also up by 2% to HKD 617 million, with mobile services EBITDA margin improving to 61%.
Let's have a closer look at our OpEx operating expenses. TSS and mobile both achieved 7% OpEx savings respectively, reflecting our continuous focus on efficiency improvement across each business segment through accelerated business process digitalization and optimizing offline to online, the O2O, sales channels and retail footprints to drive higher e- sales efficiency. On the mobile network operation side, efficiency gains were also captured mainly from improved mobile cell site architecture, enabling network design optimization, as explained by Susanna earlier. Together, with other savings from the other business, the group reported a 12% OpEx savings to $509 million. With the OpEx to revenue ratio improved significantly from 13.2% - 11.6%. Apart from OpEx, we are also exercising cautious control over our CapEx spend.
Our total CapEx for 2022 was further lowered to HKD 301 million, representing a 5% year-on-year saving. Mobile CapEx registered a 10% saving year-on-year as we have completed our territory-wide 5G coverage rollout. Looking forward, our CapEx spending is mainly for the fulfillment of license obligation in coverage for different spectrum bands and also meet demand capacity expansion. TSS CapEx was stable at HKD 183 million. We're focusing on meeting the demand for our customized smart city solutions for enterprise segment. Accordingly, the overall CapEx to revenue ratio further improved from 7.2%- 6.9%, which is well contained within our stated guidance of 10%. Next are the AFF. We have already covered the EBITDA and CapEx slide just now.
On CAC license fee, it went down by 8% from HKD 218 million - HKD 201 million, mainly due to improved sales channel efficiency and also the lower spectrum license fee from the 1800 MHz renewal. Fulfillment cost in respect to customized commercial projects increased to HKD 72 million as compared to HKD 62 million last year as a result of more delivery of customized enterprise solutions. Payment for right-of-use asset, which is representing the rental payments, decreased significantly by 14% from HKD 208 million - HKD 178 million, reflecting our effective and successful shop rationalization strategy. Payment for full year finance cost increased to HKD 113 million or 47% increase caused by high board increase which closely tracked the increase in U.S. interest rate.
The increase can be fully absorbed by the savings from various lines above which grew 11% to HKD 935 million, a year-on-year increment of totally HKD 96 million. The tax payment deferred earlier to early 2023 was accrued as part of the change in working capital, together with the higher year-end inventory level, change in working capital temporarily rose to HKD 87 billion. Our AFF for the full year grew 2.4% to HKD 724 million, translating into a final distribution of HKD 0.4315 per SSU in use, in issue. Including the interim distribution of HKD 0.3136 per SSU, total distribution for full year 2022 is HKD 0.7451. Income statement.
For the detailed P&L, we have basically covered from the revenue to EBITDA lines just now. The depreciation and amortization increased by 3% year-on-year to $745 million. This was mainly caused by higher mobile license fee amortization. As explained in the AFF slide, our P&L finance cost went up by 38% to $204 million, caused by higher market interest rate. Income tax expense was lower at $82 million as compared to $128 million last year, as we recognized a deferred tax asset of a loss-making company turning profitable. Our net profit for 2022 was up by 2% to $628 million. Turning to our gearing position, our total gross debt at the end of 2022 was stable at $5.66 billion.
Corresponding gross debt to EBITDA ratio was dropped from 3.45 x- 3.38 x. As of today, we have over $2 billion local liquidity, indeed, $2.1 billion indeed, including undrawn banking facilities of around $1.85 billion, and also $271 million cash on hand. We continue to carry an investment grade rating at BBB or Baa2. On debt maturity profile, we have refinanced the $500 million U.S. bond, due by March 2023, under a favorable market window in January 2022 at about 3% coupon rate, benefiting the future interest costs. We don't have any further bank loans and bonds maturing this year.
Our effective interest rate went up to 3%. Our current proportion of fixed to floating rate debts is approximately two to one, being two-third fixed and one-third floating, compared to just 50 to 50 last year. That means more debts are now on fixed interest rate to counteract the potential adverse impact from the interest rate hike. We shall continue to monitor the market environment such that we can further enhance and optimize our debt profile and structure when appropriate. The average debt maturity is now approximately four years. This ends my presentation. Thank you.
We'll open up the floor for questions. The first question is, roaming used to be over 10% of revenue for Hong Kong mobile operators. Is it possible to get back there or do the cheaper roaming plans now available limit it to a much smaller amount?
Thank you for the question. I think overall, we are quite optimistic, judging from the rebound of roaming in the first, at least in the first months of 2023. As I was sharing, we saw a quite a significant growth in the month, which already represents around 70% pre-COVID. Of course, over the year, I, we are still optimistic that it will be up to 60%-70% of the pre-COVID period.
Next question. With the full reopening of mainland China, how quickly do you expect the economy to recover, and what impact will it have on your enterprise solutions business there?
Again, I think we are, we are optimistic about the business, both the local side and the China side for the enterprise solutions business. Number one is that, last year we saw GDP contract by 3.5% because of all this COVID and periodic lockdown, both in Hong Kong in the first quarter and then throughout the year in mainland. Despite that, we are able to record a 3% growth. With the government forecast of 3.5% - 5% growth, GDP growth this year, and with a lot of the stimulation that the government is providing in terms of investment, in terms of the innovation and technology area, which gives a very big boost to the digital transformation efforts for both the private sector as well as the government sector. We do think that there will be a much higher growth as compared to last year for 2023.
The next question is, how do you think about interest costs in 2023 and the impact on DPS growth?
Obviously, for the year 2022, you already saw the impact of the higher interest rate. We have already refinanced with a much lower coupon in early 2022 of $650 million, which carry only a coupon of 3%. The one that Patrick just now showed in terms of refinancing, the $500 million one, it's actually carried a effective interest rate of more than 4%. You can see that already there is a savings there to counteract the full year impact of the interest rate hike. We have seen different versions of what the Fed said about, you know, interest rate, whether they would, you know, whether it's already reached a peak, whether inflation has been in control and so on. I think overall the consensus is that the, you know, even if there will be interest rate increase, it will not be that much.
I think that it's under control for the time being, fingers crossed. In terms of DPS, it's not just the impact by the interest, it's also impacted by the on the positive side, obviously, by the rebound of the roaming revenue, by the increase in terms of the enterprise revenue and so on. Overall, we are hopeful that the growth in terms of the AFF will be significantly higher.
The next question is, what specific opportunities, and promotions, have you put in place following, the announcement of i-Cable's, termination of their pay- TV operations?
I think on the our frontline already have put out quite a number of offers in order to help facilitate the i-Cable customers to migrate to our platform. I think in terms of opportunities in the past we have we don't think that our competition comes from any other pay- TV operator. The competition actually comes from all the other OTT content and free content. I was trying to elaborately explain our proposition. We still have a very unique proposition around Now TV. I think the demand for quality entertainment program and sports, in particular the sports content, is still here and it still needs to be addressed by operator.
I think we are one of the quality operators that can address the need entertainment needs from the people in Hong Kong. We are optimistic, especially riding on the very huge customer base that we have, that I tried to explain before.
That was the final question. Thanks for attending today.
Thank you very much.