TM’s Q1 net profit rises on growth across key products

By Star Online: Business
31 May 2012

KUALA LUMPUR: Telekom Malaysia Bhd’s (TM’s) year-on-year (y-o-y) first quarter net profit for the period ended March 31 surged 53.5% to RM250.63mil from RM163.31mil on the back of revenues rising by 11% to RM2.38bil.

“The growth was mainly attributed to positive growth across all key products – internet and multimedia, data, voice and other telecommunication related services,” TM said in a statement.

Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation grew by 7.1% y-o-y from RM730.9mil in the first quarter of FY2011 to RM782.6mil in the first quarter of FY2012 attributable to higher operating revenue.

Group profit after tax and minority interest rose 53.5% y-o-y to RM250.6mil compared with RM163.3mil in the corresponding quarter in 2011 due to higher revenue and higher unrealised forex gain on US dollar debt.

“In the first quarter, we saw our internet revenue grow to RM563.4mil, representing a 24.3% y-o-y growth on the back of an 11.4% increase in customers for both Streamyx and UniFi. Collectively, our broadband customer base grew to 1.97 million in the first quarter of 2012 from 1.77 million in the same period last year,” said chief executive officer Datuk Seri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa.

“UniFi continued to perform above our expectations in the first quarter of 2012. In terms of coverage, we rolled out to 1.2 million premises covering 78 exchange areas. In terms of take-up, we had activated 315,745 customers, which represents a net addition of 33.5% or 79,244 customers quarter-on-quarter or more than 250,000 customers y-o-y,” he said.

TM expects UniFi customers to achieve at least 400,000 by the end of 2012 with the number of premises passed increasing by 200,000 to reach 1.34 million.

TM plans to tap on the new growth area of information and communications technology / business process outsourcing (ICT/BPO) regionally, said Zamzamzairani.

“Our emphasis on a new growth area for TM is ICT/BPO, and we are poised to tap into this growing sector with our offerings in areas such as cloud computing and managed services. In fact, leveraging on the foundation we have laid with our regional connectivity and capabilities, we recently launched our first regional data centre facility in Hong Kong,” he said.

“This is in line with the group’s aspiration to be a regional ICT/BPO powerhouse via our ICT/BPO arm, VADS Bhd,” Zamzamzairani added.

[Source]