Telekom Malaysia revenues up, but profits down due to lack of one-off gains

State-run Telekom Malaysia™ has posted a 38% year-on-year fall in third quarter net profit, to MYR482.17 million (USD132.9 million), due to a lack of one-off exceptional gains. TM posted MYR342.7 million in exceptional items last year from the listing of its Sri Lankan and Indonesian units; quarter-on-quarter, profit rose 4%. Revenues rose 22.5% y-o-y to MYR4.23 billion in the three months ended 30 September 2006; EBITDA was up 8.8% to MYR1.9 billion. Much of the increase can be attributed to TM’s mobile business, with the group’s wireless customer base rising 62.6% year-on-year to end September 2006 with 26.5 million subscribers. TM’s mobile businesses include Celcom in its domestic market, PT Excelcomindo Pratama in Indonesia, Sri Lanka’s Dialog Telekom, Casacom in Cambodia, India’s Spice Telecom, TM International in Bangladesh and Singapore’s MobileOne. Increasing competition in the Malaysian mobile market saw Celcom’s customer base contract by 3% in the period. Celcom PT Excelcomindo Pratama posted a 59% rise in sales y-oy, whilst Dialog’s revenue increased 41%. In the fixed line arena, TM’s broadband business is spurring growth, with high speed internet customers up 73.9 y-o-y to 732,000.