
SingTel profit down 1% to S$882m
So what caused the loss despite 4% revenue growth?
An announcement by Singapore Telecommunications Limited said, “The weaker regional currencies led to fair value losses on the associates’ foreign currency liabilities and also resulted in lower translated earnings as the Group reports in Singapore Dollar.”
SingTel added that the regional mobile associates’ pre-tax earnings consequently fell 12% to S$471 million. Their contribution recorded a smaller decline of 6% in constant currency terms.
Highlighted below is the Group’s performance in Singapore:
Revenue from the Singapore business rose 1% to S$1.60 billion. Stellar growth in mobile was, however offset by lower fibre rollout revenue as OpenNet’s network coverage exceeded 75% of the island. Excluding fibre rollout, revenue grew 3%. EBITDA improved 5% to S$553 million with lower mobile selling costs and stable content costs. Mobile Communications revenue rose 9% to S$477 million, delivering another consecutive quarter of strong customer connections. SingTel Singapore added 71,000 mobile customers in the quarter, bringing the total customer base to 3.49 million, an increase of 10% from a year ago. With a share of 45.5%, SingTel registered another quarter of market share gains and extended its lead. In the postpaid market, SingTel added 40,000 customers, reflecting strong demand for smartphones and attractive mobile broadband bundles sold with data-only SIMs. The growth of data-only SIMs reduced overall postpaid ARPU by 4% to S$85 per month. Excluding data-only SIMs, postpaid ARPU was stable. Data and Internet revenue was stable at S$398 million as growth in Managed Services was partially offset by lower revenue in International Leased Circuits. Internet-related revenue rose 3% with increased adoption of higher-tier plans and fibre-based services. NCS revenue increased 8% to S$326 million, on the completion of a Ministry of Education project. NCS’ order book continued to be strong at S$2.0 billion as at end September 2011. mio TV revenue grew to S$25 million and its customer base increased by 22,000 to reach 335,000 as at end September. mio TV continues to expand its content suite, and launched its first aggregated Asian entertainment channel – Jia Le – offering top-rated dramas and variety programmes in both Hokkien - a local Chinese dialect – and Mandarin. Customers on bundled plans increased by 16,000 during the quarter, to reach 271,000 as at end September 2011, as our bundling plans gained traction. This represented 24% of all households in Singapore. |