Maxis announced its fourth quarter (Q4), 2014 financial results on Friday.
The Telco said that it added 536k subscribers in Q4 2014. Maxis has 12,913 million subscribers as of the end of 2014. There were 2,849 million postpaid subscribers and 9,624 prepaid subscribers, including 8.8 million mobile Internet users. Wireless Broadband subscribers is down at 440k in Q4 from 494k in Q3 2014.
Maxis said the decline in the usage of Messaging and Wireless Broadband subscribers is “in-line with Industry trend”.
Postpaid ARPU was at RM97, prepaid ARPU at RM35 and Wireless Broadband ARPU was at RM69 in Q4, 2014.
The company revealed that there are more than 250k postpaid subscribers using the MaxisOne Plan with an ARPU of RM150. Overall, average data usage for postpaid users is about 1.3GB in Q4, 2014.
57% of Maxis subscribers are using smartphones including 67% of postpaid users and 54% of prepaid subscribers. There are 1.2 million 4G LTE devices detected in the network.
Maxis invested RM1.1 billion in capex in 2014 for network modernisation, capacity and quality improvements as well as focused 4G coverage expansion. The company claims that it leads the 4G LTE network in the country and now covers 33% of the human populated areas in Malaysia, covering key market centres and state capitals. The new 2G and 3G modernised population coverage is now more than 75%. The Telco continues to see “significant improvement in network quality” especially lower drop call rate, higher call set up success rate and data quality.
Maxis is saying that 2014 has been a “transforming year” with “lots to change”. Moving forward, it intends to accelerate data adoption and monestisation, focusing on Internet. The Telco will be spending about RM1.1 billion in 2015 to continue its commitment to superior network service experience.
Morten Lundal, Maxis Chief Executive Officer (CEO), said, “We had much to change as we entered 2014 and we have done exactly that. We made good progress in our transition to a high performing digital company. We are growing revenue generating subscriber (RGS) again particularly in prepaid where we had the biggest losses in the past years. This quarter alone, our new prepaid customers spiked to over half a million. More importantly, we are growing data revenue and the strong uptake in MI was able to compensate the SMS decline.”
“We have also improved and modernised our network, which now is indisputably the best in Malaysia. With our improved network as well as the proactive measures we have taken to give customers a worry-free experience, our customer complaints have reduced by half compared to 2013. We are very proud of these achievements, but still there is much more work to be done. The good news is we now have positive momentum going forward and are well positioned to offer the best data network and an unmatched customer experience” he added.
For the fourth quarter (Q4) ended 31 December 2014, Maxis registered a 2.2% quarterly growth in service revenue, up to RM2,094 million from RM2,049 million in Q3 2014. For 2014, Maxis made slightly less net profit of RM1.72bil compared with RM1.77bil in 2013. Revenue was also down at RM8.3bil versus RM9.0bil in 2013.
The company announced a fourth interim dividend of eight sen (8sen) per share and will be recommending a final dividend of eight sen per share for approval at the forth coming Annual General Meeting (AGM).
