BEIJING - China’s telecommunications industry sustained steady expansion in revenue in the first three quarters, with emerging businesses such as cloud computing posting rapid growth, official data showed. The combined operating revenue of the sector stood at roughly 1.2 trillion yuan (about 167.37 billion US dollars) in the January-September period, rising 8.2 percent year on year, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Emerging businesses such as big data, cloud computing, internet data centres and Internet of Things registered a rapid revenue increase during the period. The emerging business revenue of China’s three telecom giants— China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom— jumped 33.4 percent from a year earlier to 232.9 billion yuan. Specifically, revenue from cloud computing and big data soared 127.6 percent and 62.6 percent, respectively, in the first nine months, while that from data centres logged an increase of 14.3 percent.