This article is more than 1 year old

Oz telco results season! Telstra booms, Optus slides

More than half Australia's mobiles are with Telezilla

Telstra continues to gorge on the Australian telecommunications market at the expense of its competitors, leaving Optus with a focus on squeezing efficiencies out of its operations to stay profitable.

The incumbent and number-two carrier have both announced financial results today, telling starkly different stories. Telstra's full-year income rose 6.1 per cent to $AUD26.3 billion, with mobile revenue in the vanguard, rising by 5.1 per cent to a little shy of $AUD10 billion.

Telstra's EBITDA rose by 9.5 per cent to $AUD11.1 billion, prompting the carrier to announce an off-market share byback worth up to $AUD1 billion.

Optus' first quarter for 2014-15 – its financials are aligned to SingTel's April 30 fiscal cycle – showed a fall in overall revenue (down 2.8 per cent) and in mobile revenue (1.5 per cent, attributed to the ACCC's intervention in termination rates), but its restructuring let it deliver EBITDA growth of 4.4 per cent to $AUD597 million.

The long, long shadow that Telstra casts over the Australian telecoms market is most clearly seen in mobile subscriber counts: the incumbent added 937,000 mobile subs through 2013-14 to end the year with 16 million customers, while Optus shed 126,000 customers between June 2013 and June 2014 to end the most recent quarter at 9.407 million subscribers.

The latest result means Telstra holds more than half the total Australian market. Adding Vodafone's 5.2 million mobile customers to the Optus base puts the total competitive mobile customer base at just 14.6 million (emphasising, however, Australia's love for mobiles, since the total market at 30 million subscribers is well ahead of our population of 23.5 million individuals).

The 4G market was more heartening for Optus: it more than doubled, from 1.084 million to 2.43 million.

Telstra's media release maintains the carrier's muted enthusiasm for the new government's NBN plans.

CEO David Thodey merely said that the carrier has “commenced negotiations” on changing the current agreements between Telstra, NBN Co and the government in the light of the government's “intent to move to a multi-technology NBN rollout”.

“We are committed to acting in the best interests of our shareholders, and are focused on maintaining the value of the current agreements, achieving certainty of outcome as soon as reasonably possible and minimising any additional regulatory risk”, Thodey said. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like