Telcos troubled by increasingly anemic income growth

Weak voice and roaming revenue are to blame.

Lacklustre revenue growth was a key theme in the second-quarter results of Singapore’s three telcos.

A report by Barclays highlighted that underwhelming revenue trends persisted in Q2, despite rising wireless data usage on 4G and price hikes that went effective in the fourth quarter of 2014.

The sub-par growth can be blamed mainly on shrinking voice usage, coupled with weakening roaming trends.

“We believe that (still rapidly) declining voice revenue is the main reason for this lacklustre service revenue trend. At the industry level, voice revenue is still declining by a high single-digit rate y/y every passing quarter, and voice still remains a significant part of overall service revenue (c50% as of 2Q15),” Barclays said.

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