Fatter pockets: M1 rakes in $413m profits in 1H14 on back of larger postpaid base

Service revenue grew 1.5%.

M1 Limited today revealed that for the first half of FY2014, service revenue grew 1.5% year-on-year to S$412.9 million, while mobile data rose 6.2 percentage points year-on-year to 33.6% of service revenue.

This was driven by growth in postpaid and fixed customer base, as well as higher mobile data revenue. Mobile data rose 6.2 percentage points year-on-year to 33.6% of service revenue. Net profit after tax increased 8.2% year-on-year to S$86.7 million.

According to M1, “As at end June 2014, mobile customer base was 2.0 million. Postpaid customer base grew 32,000 year-on-year while prepaid customer base decreased 130,000 due to regulatory changes that took effect on 1 April 2014, which reduced the number of prepaid SIM cards per subscriber from 10 to 3. Monthly postpaid churn was stable at 1.1%. During the quarter, the fibre customer base grew to 94,000.”

Here’s more from M1:

“We continually enhance service offerings to the enterprise segment, and in the second quarter, we launched several new high-speed fibre broadband services, including Singapore’s first 10Gbps broadband service on the national fibre network. We will further expand our managed service offerings with Unified Communications and Network Applications Services. This will be augmented by our cloud-based data centre, which will be ready in the second half of 2014,” said Ms Karen Kooi, Chief Executive Officer of M1.

Based on current economic outlook and barring unforeseen circumstances, we estimate moderate growth in net profit after tax for the year 2014.

M1’s Board of Directors has declared an interim dividend of 7.0 cents per share.