Malaysian fixed line incumbent Telekom Malaysia has published its financial results for the year ending 31 December 2017, reporting flat revenue growth for the twelve-month period under review. The telco generated a total turnover of MYR12.09 billion (USD3.1 billion), up just 0.2% year-on-year from MYR12.06 billion in FY 2016, with an 8.3% annualised increase in ‘internet ‘revenues (to MYR3.97 billion) failing to offset declines in the ‘voice’ (down 4.5% y-o-y to MYR3.18 billion), ‘data’ (down 2.6% to MYR2.68 billion) and ‘other’ (down 2.6% to MYR2.26 billion) sectors. EBITDA in FY 2017 totalled MYR3.58 billion, representing a drop of 5.6% from the previous fiscal year, primarily due to higher operating costs mainly related to mobile services, while reported EBIT was 5.3% lower at MYR1.09 billon, attributed to higher operating expenses and foreign exchanges losses. Meanwhile, Telekom Malaysia saw a notable increase in net profit, which rose by 19.8% y-o-y to MYR930 billion on the back of a foreign exchange gain on the company’s borrowings in the year under review. Excluding this gain, the company’s normalised net profit was up 1.8% against FY 2016 at MYR863 million. Capital expenditure stood at MYR2.76 billion in 2017, lower than its previous forecast due to what it termed the ‘internal re-prioritisation of projects’.
In operational terms, at the end of December 2017 Telekom Malaysia had a total of 2.33 million broadband subscribers on its books, down marginally from 2.37 million a year earlier, with 1.13 million of those signed up to its ‘UniFi’ service. Notably, the operator said that 98% of its UniFi customers are now on a connection offering downlink speeds of at least 10Mbps. Monthly broadband ARPU was also down slightly, from MYR201 in Q4 2016, to MYR197 in the corresponding period of 2017. Fixed voice lines in service continued to decline, however, falling to 4.09 million at end-2017, down from 4.18 million a year earlier.