Welcome everyone to Far EasTone's 2021 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent background noise. After the presentation, there will be a question- and- answer session. Please follow the instructions given at that time if you would like to ask a question. For your information, the webcast replay will be available within an hour after the conference has finished. Please visit www.fareastone.com.tw under the Investor Relations section. Now I would like to introduce Mr. Gary Lai, the IR Officer. Gary, please begin.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much again to attend Far EasTone Third Quarter 2021 Conference Call. Today, our President, Chee, and CFO, Sharon, both here with us on the call. Before Chee's brief presentation, please pay attention to this primer page about the cover statement. Let me pass to Chee. Thank you.
Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. It's our third quarter IR call, and thank you for joining us. I'll start with Taiwan's mobile market kind of dynamics. As you can see on the left-hand side, the chart shows that the penetration, the mobile, market has been pretty saturated for quite a while, with little fluctuation, and then a lot of that is to do with the second SIM.
On the other hand, though, if we look at the mobile service revenue, we do see, you know, the growth momentum continued for two quarters already. Of course, this is mainly driven by the 5G deployment and 5G sales. Especially, FET is leading the pack, and we turned positive on the YOY, you know, since March.
The incremental we are looking at every month, we also show the biggest among our peers. This is positive news, and we are also pleased to report that. If you look at our third quarter performance, across the board, we have beaten our guidance. Started with the total revenue, we exceeded by 1.4%, and the EBITDA is 2.5%, and the net income and then EPS is both exceeded by 10%. Year-to-date for the first three quarters, it's also showing exceeding the target across the board. If it comes to the net debt, we were able to pay down our debt a little bit.
The net debt and also the borrowing both have come down. If you look at the net debt to EBITDA ratio, it also has been reduced. In terms of the free cash flow, we are at TWD 11.89 billion level. This is very healthy. It remains healthy. In terms of the cash-based CapEx for the year, right now we are at a TWD 9 billion watermark. It is in line with our guidance, which is around TWD 14 billion for the year. Okay, if you turn to the next page. Some financial highlights for your information as well. We have seen a higher third quarter total revenue growth.
It was mainly, well, it was attributed to two things. First is the strong iPhone 13 launch, which happened this year in September. If you remember last year, iPhone, Apple delayed its launch for one month. This year it was on time, so it was launched on September 24, I think. The first day was actually the second-largest event for iPhone on the first-day sale. We had a very good iPhone launch this year. Also our new economy revenue has been doing very well this quarter despite of the pandemic. My team really pulled through, okay? If you look at it, the YOY, right? We are looking at for the second quarter, it was 4.4%.
In this third quarter, it is 11.4%. On the right-hand side, it is our EBITDA. It's also growing, the growth expanded to 4.7% YOY for this quarter. This is of course the better sales from the merchandise and ICT and DCB margins, right? Also, we have completed the phase I APT collaboration or our sharing of the 3.5 5G spectrum deal. The phase I was completed, was approved, there is the injection of APT's payment for the spectrum, the share. That also helped. If you look at the next page. For our mobile service revenue, it definitely has rebounded.
We look at the YOY positives. It started in March, and then it continued for two quarters in a row. Now we are looking at 3% growth for this quarter together, okay? In terms of the post-paid customers, it continued to grow in the third quarter for the 12th consecutive quarter. I know there are some numbers that is posted by the authority, but that is a blended both postpaid and prepaid. For those of you that have been following the, you know, this telecom industry, you will know the prepaid number is more fluffy sometimes. That every company has different policy as to how to manage the prepaid numbers.
We are really focused on the postpaid. This is showing for 12 quarters in a row that it has been growing, and we are very glad to see that. For this quarter in particular, it's 1.4% year-over-year compared to last year's same time. Because the mobile, we had a 499 event, right? This ARPU was definitely very impacted back in 2018. But then because of the 5G, we have started to see the recovery as well. Like, they both turned positive for us in the March-April timeframe, and then for both postpaid and also blended ARPU.
We remain to be the number one in our industry. The average for the ARPU is TWD 574 for the blended, and they grew 2.9%. The postpaid is higher, it's TWD 708, and they grew 1.4%. This is very healthy, and it is a definitely good indicator, right, to show the recovery in the mobile ARPU. It's started climbing up now. The trend on the right-hand side shows you more quarters, so you can see what I was talking about since the 5G launch. We definitely on the right direction to climb up for the ARPU. Okay, the next slide is about new economy, how it drives our revenue growth.
For the year- to- date or to the third quarter, the first three quarters together, the new economy revenue, we see 17.6% increase. It accounted for 16.5% of our total revenue for the three quarters. This is both exceeding our own target that we set. We were a little bit afraid last year when we had less number of contracts signed, and then we thought it would may have some downstream effect in this year. Also who would know the pandemic came back, right? With all that, the team really pulled through. We are still doing really well in our new economy area.
On the right-hand side, give you some details or some breakdown. You see ICT as a whole, we grew like 15% year-over-year. The cloud service grew especially very impressive on the 49% compared to last year. Our total contract value also increased 62% year-over-year. On the right-hand side, the mobile commerce that's referring to our friDay shopping, even though our base is small, but we still have posted really impressive growth year-over-year, that is 36%. It's even bigger than the biggest EC out there. It is encouraging, and we'll continue to grow in this area as well. Our media service and also our direct carrier billing also are growing, you know, continue to grow in double digits. Okay.
All right. Now those are more of the financial indicators. Okay, the next section, I'll just briefly, you know, update you on the business side. If you haven't heard already, I have to repeat again that we won this global number one for 5G, and it's certified by Opensignal. We won in three categories. That's the downlink, uplink speed and also the video experience. This actually just happened a few days before the iPhone launch, and we believe it also helped boosted, you know, our conversion because of this this world kind of recognition. Okay. Our 5G penetration, and this is referring to the postpaid because at that time, we did not offer the prepaid 5G service.
We exceeded our 20% for the 5G penetration for our postpaid customers. For the average monthly fee for renewal customers, we look at more than 20% of a uplift. Currently, we have deployed 8,700 or so 5G stations out there. We will reach 90% coverage for the islandwide or nationwide by the end of the year. Okay. Okay, also just on iPhone 13 launch, we had actually a real event held in the store instead of virtual event. We attracted quite a few, quite a bit of traffic. Also most importantly, the results are good.
Like, the long-term contracts, they were very popular for iPhone because iPhone, as you know, is higher price than average, right? We have these bundled offers, and we offer like a 48-month contract, and then you can take the iPhone 13 home free, you know. There is different kind of combination types of offers that we had. 80% of the customers for the shoppers, they signed up for the 30 months or longer kind of contract in the first month. 94% overall, you know, signed up for rate plan that is TWD 999 and above, that's TWD 1,399. Okay.
For our customer loyalty application, FET Mobile Circle, that is our digital platform where we want to engage with our customers more and then to encourage more traffic and also attract more traffic and also encourage more transactions. This helped drive up our video take-up rate online and also it leads traffic for conversion in our friDay shopping area. In fact, so far it has exceeded target that we set for them. This is kind of like our trial kind of a play, and it already has exceeded TWD 100 million of transaction completed. That is from the traffic that Mobile Circle has led to friDay shopping. It was good.
Our analytics and personalized recommendation engine work as we expected. We will do more with that. Okay. The next slide is on the enterprise side. Like I said, our enterprise team has done really well. A few highlights, for example, there is a big initiative sponsored by the government that is basically called air conditioning in every classroom for the elementary school. It's a big kind of deal. This is also what would come with it, beyond this air conditioning, you need energy management system, given that we all know electricity is something getting scarce these days. We actually, Far EasTone, we have won 9 contracts out of the 22.
We bid for 18. Every single one of them, there are more than 10 vendors competing for it. We got the highest share of the whole thing, and then that's like a 44% or so. The total amounts to about TWD 1 billion, over TWD 1 billion. Most importantly, this is our homegrown solution. In that case, the margin is also better than if we use a third-party solution, and this is our homegrown, okay? Another highlight, I say, that is really the very first 5G application in Taiwan, that we have the 5G telemedicine service that has now expanded to Miaoli County and more in the pipeline.
In fact, by the end of the year, we will have in 10 counties and 36 towns in these rural areas that they will have the 5G telemedicine service available. We actually got TWD 200 million contract from the government that is Ministry of Health and Welfare, you know, to continue to work this. Eventually it will go to, like, 14 different counties that will cover like 50 or so the rural areas to have them have this 5G telemedicine services. This is continuing going really, really strong because the government is also determined to, you know, to bridge the gap, the resources gap between the rural area and the urban area, especially in the health area. This is where we come in to help with our technology.
This communication platform that we built for this telemedicine is also FET's homegrown solution. We are very proud that we are the first to offer this service, and we are able to really help from, you know, giving back to the society and helping the residents in the rural area to get better medical treatment. Another good example is that we kicked off this Foxconn cloud data center. We won this project from Foxconn, with Foxconn, that we are going to build this cloud, their first cloud data center in Taiwan for them. This is with our homegrown, you know, monitoring and management solutions that we are using ourselves. We have our IT professionals and, you know, experts that will be working on this project.
This is a partnership with VMware. This is a big project and, you know, kind of like a key indicator, a significant project for Foxconn's journey of digital transformation as well. We are very glad that we are part of it, and we are looking forward to the completion of it. Actually, this is just a few months kind of project, so it won't be long before we see this all completed. Okay. We have received several awards, and here's just a few of them for your reference. Okay. I think we are mostly recognized quite a bit in our CSR efforts. Okay. Right. Okay. Last is our first quarter focus.
There are a lot of things I would say business as usual. Like, we need to continue to push more, to push for more 4G to 5G user migration. At the same time, we will hopefully maintain good uplift. Also, we want to increase our Mobile Circle's monthly active users. There is a double eleven shopping spree that's coming up. Our EC also, of course, is a participant of it.
We are looking forward to some good results as well. Of course, with all those IT, ICT projects that we have won, we are going to deliver them on time and on budget. Most importantly, we will finish the year strong. Okay? That concluded my presentation for you all, and then I'm ready to take some questions.
Yes. Thank you, President Chee. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our question- and- answer session. If you have a question for any of today's speakers, please press zero one on your telephone keypad, and you will enter the queue. After you are announced, please ask your question. If you find that your question has been answered before it is your turn to speak, please press zero two to cancel the question. Now please press zero one to ask the question. Thank you. The first question is coming from Neale Anderson of HSBC. Go ahead, please.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Two questions, please. You were higher than your guidance on all measures, but the net income was particularly high, 110%, and also the margin was higher than the previous trend. I was wondering if there's any one-off factors in there and how sustainable that net income performance and achievement is. That's the first question. The second one relates to the new economy business. You again, you've hit your year-end target earlier there. Was there any particular part of that business, either consumer or enterprise, that is growing faster than you expected at the start of the year? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Neale. Okay, to answer your first question, our net income increased 10% year-over-year. Yes, there is one-time sale of our one office building. That does contribute to it. If we exclude that, and we are still looking at 1.3% growth. Overall, you know, it is still a positive, good story. Yeah, we sold this building in July. I think that's when we booked the revenue. That was accounted for in our original forecast for this year anyway.
To your second question about the new economy, if there is any area that is better than I expected, I think all of them are doing very well, and they really, so you know, like I said, even though I anticipated, maybe there's some lingering effect from last year's that we didn't get as many contracts, compared with the year before, but the team was able to catch up.
Like, we got a couple big contracts this year, and the one that I mentioned about the EMS, that alone is a TWD 1 billion project, right? And then the other telemedicine, that's a TWD 200 million. So we got quite a few big projects like that. And then so I think it's across the board. EC or e-commerce is also doing very well. I cannot complain. All of them are good.
Great. Thank you.
Sure.
If you would like to ask the question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. We are now in question- and- answer session. If you would like to ask the question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. Thank you.
Well, maybe everyone sees that we have a very good quarter to sum it up.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, please press zero one on your keypad if you would like to ask the question. Thank you.
If there is no one right now wants to ask question, you can always reach IR offline. We are always here. We probably just end the call right now here and see you next quarter. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Thank you for your attention and participation. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions. We'll be more than happy to discuss with you. Thank you.
Thank you, President Chee. Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for your participation in Far EasTone's conference. There will be a webcast replay within an hour. Please visit www.fareastone.com.tw under the Investor Relations section. You may now disconnect. Goodbye.
Bye.