The Age
17 May 2008
SINGTEL posted its March-year profit this week, and the focus, as usual, was on its Australian subsidiary Optus.
It did OK, boosting underlying net profit by 4.6% on 3.8% higher revenue - but the real fizz came from SingTel's part-owned Asian mobile operators.
Optus is, at heart, in the business of mobile telephony, which suffered a 6.5% slide in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in the year but still accounted for 71% of total EBITDA.
And in that game, price caps are squeezing profit margins, and Telstra is aggressively driving home the advantage it gained with the rapid roll-out of its Next G mobile network in 2006. Next G covers 99% of the population, and its 3G bandwidth allows Telstra to market mobile products that are protecting margins. Optus is still in catch-up mode, and has just announced that it will boost its own 3G network roll-out spend by $315 million to $815 million to bring network coverage to 98% of the population by 2009.
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