Cellular-News
31st Jan 2008
MobileOne (M1) has announced its Q4 07 results, the first of the three Singaporean operators to do so. In a tight market, M1's figures are somewhat disappointing, its 68k fourth quarter net additions falling short of the 88k recorded in Q4 06. It ended the year on 1.54m, up 14.8% year-on-year. Although this growth rate is over double that recorded in 2006, we should bear in mind the loss of customers in Q2 06 as a result of the customer re-registration programme, which of course had a profound impact on the 2006 growth rate.
M1 has clearly been working hard to add new customers with its subscriber acquisition costs (SAC's) rising from S$140 in 2006 to S$190 in 2007, but the effect of this 36% rise in expenditure is not immediately obvious. Moreover, 76% of its 198k yearly net additions were lower-value prepaid customers, with its contract base declining to 55.8% of the total, down 4.7pp year-on-year. Growth to the prepaid base seems to have been stimulated by price cuts, with monthly ARPU falling from S$19.5 in Q4 06 to S$18.2 in Q4 07.
Contract ARPU compensated slightly for this loss, increasing by S$1.5 to S$62.4, and this contributed to a 6.4% uplift in service revenue from S$773m in 2006 to S$803m in 2007. However, this was not enough to compensate for the considerable increase in SAC's, and EBITDA was down 3.3% to S$321m, while the EBITDA margin fell 4.5pp to 44.1
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