Axiata Group Berhad (Axiata), the parent company of Celcom Axiata Bhd announced its Quarter 1, 2015 financial results last week.
As of Q1 2015, Celcom has 12,279 million subscribers. There are 9,540 million prepaid and 2,739 million postpaid subscribers.
Celcom lost 688k subscribers in the quarter including some 624k prepaid users. Celcom said that subscriber acquisition competition intensified mainly in the prepaid segment during the quarter. There are 1,534 million broadband subscribers.
According to the research arm of TA Securities Holdings Bhd, “Due to the delay in IT system upgrade and the East Coast flood aftermath, Celcom’s subscriber base for both prepaid and postpaid suffered major contraction. In fact, net loss of 625K prepaid subscribers is Celcom’s worst record historically. It appears that for 1Q15, both Maxis & Digi’s subscriber base expansion was at the expense of Celcom. The only brightspot was that blended ARPU remained stable.”
In the quarter, Celcom’s ARPU for postpaid is RM90 (RM88 in 1Q14) and prepaid ARPU stands at RM33 (RM34 in Q414). Broadband ARPU is at RM41.
Minutes of Usage (MOU) also dropped in 1Q15. Celcom postpaid subscribers used an average 284 minutes (296 minutes in 4Q14) while prepaid subscribers used 170 minutes (178 minutes in 4Q14).
For the quarter under review (1Q15), Celcom reported a revenue of RM1.92 billion while service revenue reached RM1.73 billion.
Celcom’s quarterly EBITDA (Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) is at RM772 million and PATAMI (profit after tax, amortisation and minority interests) stood at RM452 million (normalised).
Albeit a slower quarter QoQ, data revenue continue to grow favourably supported by an increase in mobile internet revenue (+5%). However, this was insufficient to offset the decline in voice (-5%) and SMS (-23%) revenue, Celcom said.
In a media statement, Axiata said that challenges continued at Celcom due to its IT transformation project which is now at the final stages of being resolved. The IT transformation is aimed at achieving competitive advantage and delivering the best customer experience to customers in the long term. YoY revenue grew 1% whilst EBITDA and PATAMI declined 8% and 12% respectively, impacted primarily by higher devices sale and change in the revenue mix. Initiatives have been put in place to boost sales and revenue, focusing on re-energising the distribution channels and introducing new data packages.
Data was the fastest growing segment with double digit 36% YoY growth. Data revenue accounted for 26% of total revenue compared to 19% in the previous year. To support the growing demand for data related products, Axiata said that Celcom will continue its aggressive investments in data network.
Celcom is expected to launch a new prepaid product by June 2015.
