Digi postpaid base rises at fastest pace in two years

PETALING JAYA: Digi.Com Bhd said its postpaid subscribers base in the last quarter of 2016 grew at its fastest pace in two years on strong demand for high speed mobile and digital services.

The telecommunication company (telco), however, saw its fourth quarter ended Dec 31, 2016 earnings declining slightly by 2.02% year-on-year (y-o-y) to RM374.63mil while revenue was also lower by 2.91% to RM1.67bil.

The company said this put its full year net profit at RM1.63bil, or 21 sen a share compared with RM1.72bil, or 22.15 a shares it made a year earlier.

Digi has declared its fourth dividend at 4.8 sen a shares, bringing its total payout for the year to 20.9 sen a share.

“This has been a year of strong execution for Digi.

“We have kept focused on delivering excellent, quality internet experiences for our customers on mobile while remaining solid in our operational performance,” Digi chief executive officer Albern Murty said in a press release.

The group said in its press release that its results showed continued postpaid customer momentum, the highest recorded growth in the last eight quarters with solid net adds.

In the fourth quarter, Digi’s service revenue remained resilient at RM1.56bil, up 0.1% quarter-on-quarter while on a yoy basis the decline was stemmed to 2.0%.

Postpaid revenue grew 13.6% yoy in the fourth quarter to RM511mil, while prepaid revenue moderated by 8.2% y-o-y to RM1.04bil on a relatively flat 10.2 million prepaid base.

Digi’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) was up 5.7% to RM741mil at 44% margins while normalised net profit registered a growth of 7.3% to RM410mil.

The financial year 2016’s service revenue stood at RM6.23bil with an EBITDA of RM2.96bil or 45% margin, supported by 12.3 million subscribers on its network.

Digi said active internet subscribers reached 8.1 million or 65.8% of total subscribers.

It added the number of LTE subscribers grew another 509,000 to 4.2 million, representing 34.9% of total subscribers.

“Customers are increasingly recognising the quality of our 4G plus network, internet and digital services, benefiting from the significant investments in 4G LTE, 4G+, fibre and digitisation efforts we have made over the year.

“This has led to strong growth in data usage across our customer base,”Albern said.

Digi closed unchanged yesterday RM4.92.

A total hands. of 8.314 million shares at changed