China Mobile has reported net profit of RMB27.88 billion ($4.5 billion) for the first three months of 2013, just 0.3% higher than in the same quarter of 2012, as efforts to increase the usage of smartphone data services ate into its revenues.

The rate of growth is the lowest that China Mobile (Beijing, China) has reported in three quarters and came despite a 5.7% increase in quarterly revenues, to RMB134.7 billion.

ZTE Corp, China's second-largest telecoms equipment maker, has essentially stopped doing business in Iran after a U.S. investigation into alleged sales of embargoed equipment, the company's chairman told Reuters on Thursday.

ZTE (Shenzhen, China) said in March 2012 that it would curtail business in Iran following a report by Reuters that it sold Iran's largest telecoms firm a powerful surveillance system capable of monitoring telephone and Internet communications. The company is now facing a U.S. criminal investigation over the issue.

Italian mobile phone operator Wind is to spend $1.3 billion on building a fourth-generation (4G) mobile broadband network to step up competition to rivals Telecom Italia and Vodafone.

The investment will use technology from Italy's Sirti (Milan, Italy) and Huawei Technologies (Shenzhen, China) , the firms said in a statement on Friday, giving a boost to the Chinese telecoms equipment maker as it battles for work on 4G networks across Europe.

Chinese equipment maker Huawei expects its revenues to grow at a compound annual rate of 10% over the next five years, despite the current slowdown in the equipment market and its difficulties in the US.

Huawei (Shenzhen, China) provided the forecast after reporting that net profit for 2012 was 32% higher than for 2011, at RMB15.4 billion ($2.48 billion), with revenues up 9%, to RMB220.2 billion.

“In 2012, Huawei met business performance expectations through improved operational efficiency,” said Guo Ping, Huawei’s rotating and acting chief executive.

A slowdown in network equipment and device markets has taken its toll on China’s ZTE, which has reported a net loss of RMB2.84 billion ($457 million) for 2012, compared with a net profit of RMB2.06 billion the year before.

China’s second-biggest network equipment maker, behind Huawei (Shenzhen, China), ZTE (Shenzhen, China) also reported a 2.36% decline in revenues, to RMB84.22 billion.

In a statement accompanying the figures, ZTE pointed to the slowdown in equipment investments by the global telecoms industry in 2012.

China's ZTE Corp, which helped bring the telephone to millions of homes during the Deng Xiaoping era, is counting on a new generation of tech-savvy smartphone users to drive at least $7.5 billion of 4G network projects and elevate its sagging fortunes.

China Telecom has reported a fall in full-year net profit, despite healthy growth in revenues, due to increased spending on iPhone marketing as it tries to capture higher-value customers at the expense of its bigger rivals.

The operator – which runs China’s largest fixed-line network but is number three in the mobile market – saw net profit decline by 9.5% in 2012, to RMB14.9 billion ($2.4 billion), compared with 2011, while its revenues grew by 15.5%, to RMB283 billion.

Aiming to expand its business in what looks set to become the world’s largest M2M market, module maker Telit has unveiled two CDMA modules developed specifically for use in China.

The manufacturer’s CE910-SC and DE910-SC modules have been designed for Chinese M2M applications using CDMA network standards and R-UIM card technology.

China Mobile Ltd said it plans to spend 41.7 billion yuan ($6.7 billion) developing 4G technology this year, hoping to tap pent-up demand for Apple Inc smartphones as it gets an iPhone model that will finally run on its network.

The world's largest mobile carrier - with more than twice as many subscribers as there are people in the United States - already has more than 10 million of its customers owning an iPhone even though the gadget doesn't properly work with the Chinese firm's homegrown TD-SCDMA 3G technology, which is not compatible with global technologies.

Driven by increased consumer expectations for mobile broadband, solving operator problems by adding small cells to more traditional network topographies in outdoor environments was a recurring theme at this year’s Mobile World Congress. A roundup of some of the backhaul news from the shows follows.