Forex gain boosts TM's second quarter earnings

PETALING JAYA: Telekom Malaysia Bhd’s (TM) net profit for the second quarter ended June 30, 2017 rose 50.94% to RM210.48 million from RM139.45 million a year ago, on a foreign exchange gain.
In a filing with Bursa Malaysia yesterday, the group reported a foreign exchange gain on its borrowings during the quarter compared with foreign exchange losses reported a year ago.
Revenue for the quarter fell 2.14% to RM2.98 billion from RM3.05 billion a year ago despite a continuing RM77.4 million or 8.6% increase in internet and multimedia revenue, due to lower revenue from data, voice, other telecommunication and non-telecommunication related services.
Internet and multimedia services registered higher revenue of RM982.3 million compared with RM904.9 million a year ago, due to increase in its UniFi customer base at more than one million customers compared with 900,245 a year ago.
The lower revenue led to operating profit before finance cost decreasing 7.8% to RM258.2 million from RM280.0 million a year ago.
For the six months ended June 30, 2017, net profit fell 4.54% to RM440.92 million from RM461.89 million a year ago while revenue rose marginally to RM5.94 billion from RM5.90 billion a year ago.
To date, TM has over 2.7 million high-speed broadband ports nationwide and its LTE coverage has expanded to more than 80% in major cities. It has 2.36 million broadband customers and 88% of its UniFi customers are on packages with speeds of 10Mbps and above, compared with 68% a year ago while webe’s penetration of TM’s household stood at 5.6%.
Total capital expenditure for the first six months amounted to RM899 million or 15.1% of revenue, as the group continued with its investments in high speed broadband, sub-urban broadband and mobility.
TM has declared an interim single-tier dividend of 9.4 sen per share or about RM353.2 million for the financial year ending Dec 31, 2017, payable on Oct 13, 2017.
Group CEO Datuk Seri Mohammed Shazalli Ramly said the group will focus on empowering digitisation in its daily operations to optimise processes and productivity.
“We are expediting our fibre rollout and expanding our reach with our ongoing investments, for example to high-rise buildings; and made some key execution leadership appointments to facilitate this, amongst others,” he said in a statement yesterday.
TM is also working towards liberating its WiFi Access Points and continues to strengthen its mobility presence with its continued expansion of LTE. On the business front, it is consolidating its managed accounts organisation into TM One.