Singapore’s third largest telecoms operator by subscribers M1 Limited (M1) has released its unaudited group results for the nine months ended 30 September 2014, reporting that service revenue increased 1.1% year-on-year to SGD619.8 million (USD486.9 million), driven by higher revenue from mobile data and growth in the fixed customer base. The carrier said that mobile data as a percentage of service revenue increased by 6.3 percentage points y-o-y, to account for 34.5% of the total in 9M14. EBITDA of SGD249 million was a 6.8% improvement on the SGD233 million booked in the first nine months of 2013. Net profit for the nine-month period under review grew 9.7% to SGD131.2 million, while net profit for the third quarter alone was up 12.7% on an annualised basis to SGD44.5 million. 9M14 CAPEX was SGD100, up from SGD79 million previously.
M1 closed out September 2014 with a total of 1.903 million mobile customers, of whom 1.147 million were on post-paid contracts – up 22,000 y-o-y. However, the pre-paid base declined from 1.007 million to 756,000 due to the regulatory ruling which has reduced the maximum number of pre-paid SIM cards per subscriber from ten to three. Quarter-on-quarter, pre-paid revenue was stable at SGD20.3 million, it said, and monthly post-paid churn was unchanged at 1.1%. M1 also reported a total of 98,000 fibre-optic customers at end-September, up from 77,000 twelve months earlier.
Commenting on the results, M1 chief executive officer Ms Kooi, said: ‘In September, we introduced new 4G smartphone plans to offer customers a wider choice and larger data bundles, which will better meet their data usage requirements. We are also on track to complete the upgrade of our 4G network to LTE-A [Long Term Evolution-Advanced] nationwide, which can offer higher throughput speeds of up to 300Mbps, by end of the year’. Based on the current economic outlook and barring unforeseen circumstances, M1 is estimating moderate growth in net profit after tax for FY2014.