Maxis announced its Quarter 1, 2015 financial results on the 27 April 2015.
In the quarter, Maxis added 328k new revenue generating subscriptions (RGS), bringing its total RGS base to 12 million.
There are 2,823 million postpaid revenue generating subscriptions and ARPU is at RM96. Maxis said that it currently has more than 350k MaxisONE plan users with an ARPU about RM150.
As for Prepaid, there are 8,992 million prepaid revenue generating subscriptions. APRU in 1Q15 is at RM38 compared to RM35 in 4Q14. The Telco said that ARPU is impacted by lower domestic voice, SMS usage and pay per use data.
Mobile Internet subscribers is at 9 million, out which some 1.5 million are LTE users. The average data consumption of a postpaid user is about 1.4GB a month while for prepaid it is at 1GB a month. Maxis said voice and video streaming accounted about 80% of the network traffic. About 377,000 users are Wireless broadband subscribers.
There are 1,613 million LTE-enabled smartphones detected in the network. The Telco said 55% of its prepaid customers are smartphone users while its higher for postpaid at 70%.
In terms of network, nationwide 4G LTE coverage is at 39% as of 1Q15, 3G is at 88%. About 78% of the network modernisation for 2G and 3G are completed.
Morten Lundal, Maxis Chief Executive Officer, said, “It’s a solid turnaround story for our prepaid segment. We now have four consecutive quarters of growth in revenues and subscribers. We are also seeing a positive transition in our postpaid segment. We had a revenue impact after we took steps to avoid any chance of bill shocks with Maxis, and we furthermore had seasonal roaming revenue in Q4 2014, so we’re comfortable with marginal net decline.”
“MaxisOne plan is doing well both for the customer and for Maxis. One thing that’s certain, Malaysians love data. We are seeing an average of 1.4GB monthly consumption by postpaid customers and 1GB by prepaid customers respectively. Our data traffic is projected to grow over five times in the next three years. So we will continue with a high investment level to deliver this capacity and give the best data experience to our customers.” he added.
For the first quarter of 2015, Maxis delivered a service revenue of RM2,127 million, up 1.6% from Q4 2014.
On the back of a higher revenue base, EBITDA of RM1,047 million and EBITDA margin of 48.7% for the period were higher than the previous quarter. Profit for the period stood at RM455 million, higher than the RM419 million recorded in the preceding quarter, and this was primarily driven by higher EBITDA quarter-on-quarter.
Maxis said it will continue with high capex for 2015 at above RM1.1 billion to complete its network modernisation, drive 4G LTE expansion, as well as to further improve capacity and quality.
The company announced a first interim dividend of five sen per share.
