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Optus profit up while SingTel profit down

The Australian telco’s parent company suffers a net profit after tax decline of nearly 10 per cent in the third quarter of fiscal year 2012.

Optus has recorded a net profit after tax (NPAT) growth of 4.4 per cent in its fiscal year 2012 third quarter while parent company, SingTel, has reported a profit drop of 9.6 per cent.

Earlier today, Optus announced it had increased its mobile customer base by 182,000 to 9.41 million.

While SingTel posted a 13 per cent increase in overall mobile customers across all different businesses to 434 million, a number of factors dragged down NPAT despite strong performances from Optus.

Strong gains in mobile customer market share in Singapore leading to higher acquisition and retention cost was one of the causes along with weakened currencies burdening contributions from smaller regional SingTel businesses, particularly from India.

Overall, NPAT for Optus was $177 million and $902 million for SingTel in Q3 of its 2012 financial year.

Optus’ operating revenue was up 1.5 per cent to $2.42 billion with mobile revenue contributing to $1.62 billion of that number.

EBITDA rose by two per cent to $2.42 billion.

For SingTel, operating revenue was up three per cent to $4.83 billion.

In Optus’ last quarter, it posted a 1.3 per cent mobile revenue growth to $1.5 billion, bumping up customer numbers by 131,000 to 9.23 million.

Incoming mobile service revenue jumped by 18 per cent this quarter thanks to customer growth and increased SMS and voice revenue.

Optus’ mobile business is expected to grow even more as it progressively rolls out its 4G LTE network.

As for the telco’s business and wholesale fixed-line division, the growth was modest with wholesale revenue up three per cent. Voice revenue remained flat.

Satellite revenue was up 10 per cent thanks to a multimillion contract with GlobeCast last year.

Optus’ consumer fixed-line business saw a lower on-net broadband average revenue per user (ARPU). On-net customers use the telco’s own network infrastructure and are overall more profitable than off-net customers.

On-net customer revenue was down five per cent partly due to more generous data limits on new plans. The on-net broadband customer base is now at 965,000.

Optus’ 2012 fiscal year so far has yield $7.7 billion in revenue, EBITDA of $1.68 billion and NPAT of $533 million.

More to follow.

Nominations for the 2012 ARN IT Industry Awards open on Tuesday, June 12.

More about: etwork, Optus
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