Chart of the Day: Strained telcos grapple with steadily dwindling earnings

Who was the best performer in H1?

Singapore's extremely saturated mobile market is taking its toll on the country's three telecommunications providers.

This chart from Barclays shows that SingTel, StarHub, and M1 have all been grappling with near-zero revenue growth since the start of 2014.

From an operator perspective, SingTel appears to come with the best momentum from 1H15, with its service revenue growing at around 2%. Meanwhile both M1 and StarHub both saw flat to modest declines.

Barclays stated that one key differentiator has been the prepaid business. Over the past 10-12 quarters, StarHub has lost 1200bps of revenue market share to SingTel, and it continued to lose prepaid revenue in 1H15.

Meanwhile, M1 has been losing prepaid revenue as well in 1H although more modestly at 2.6% year-on-year. Barclays also highlighted M1’s soft trend in postpaid revenue.

“We think the soft revenue trend is mainly on account of slowing mobile service revenue growth while fixed-line revenues continue to decay,” Barclays said.