SingTel profit down 1% to S$882m

So what caused the loss despite 4% revenue growth?

An announcement by Singapore Telecommunications Limited said, “The weaker regional currencies led to fair value losses on the associates’ foreign currency liabilities and also resulted in lower translated earnings as the Group reports in Singapore Dollar.”

SingTel added that the regional mobile associates’ pre-tax earnings consequently fell 12% to S$471 million. Their contribution recorded a smaller decline of 6% in constant currency terms.

Highlighted below is the Group’s performance in Singapore:

Revenue from the Singapore business rose 1% to S$1.60 billion. Stellar growth in mobile was, however offset by lower fibre rollout revenue as OpenNet’s network coverage exceeded 75% of the island. Excluding fibre rollout, revenue grew 3%.

EBITDA improved 5% to S$553 million with lower mobile selling costs and stable content costs.

Mobile Communications revenue rose 9% to S$477 million, delivering another consecutive quarter of strong customer connections. SingTel Singapore added 71,000 mobile customers in the quarter, bringing the total customer base to 3.49 million, an increase of 10% from a year ago. With a share of 45.5%, SingTel registered another quarter of market share gains and extended its lead.

In the postpaid market, SingTel added 40,000 customers, reflecting strong demand for smartphones and attractive mobile broadband bundles sold with data-only SIMs. The growth of data-only SIMs reduced overall postpaid ARPU by 4% to S$85 per month. Excluding data-only SIMs, postpaid ARPU was stable.

Data and Internet revenue was stable at S$398 million as growth in Managed Services was partially offset by lower revenue in International Leased Circuits. Internet-related revenue rose 3% with increased adoption of higher-tier plans and fibre-based services.

NCS revenue increased 8% to S$326 million, on the completion of a Ministry of Education project. NCS’ order book continued to be strong at S$2.0 billion as at end September 2011.

mio TV revenue grew to S$25 million and its customer base increased by 22,000 to reach 335,000 as at end September. mio TV continues to expand its content suite, and launched its first aggregated Asian entertainment channel – Jia Le – offering top-rated dramas and variety programmes in both Hokkien - a local Chinese dialect – and Mandarin. Customers on bundled plans increased by 16,000 during the quarter, to reach 271,000 as at end September 2011, as our bundling plans gained traction. This represented 24% of all households in Singapore.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia