Singapore Big 3 telcos to suffer sluggish fibre take-up from companies

Even as subscriptions grow by 10,000.

According to OCBC, while the Singapore mobile services market has hit penetration rates of nearly 150%, the proliferation of smartphones and tablets should continue to drive growth, especially for mobile data usage.

Here's more from OCBC:

And with the faster-than-expected switch from 3G to 4G, we are also likely to see a gradual and modest uplift in ARPU (average revenue per user) in 2013.

With Singapore’s Next Generation National Broadband Network (NBN) having achieved 95% island-wide coverage, we expect fibre subscriptions to continue at a healthy clip.

The number of fibre subscribers hit >220k at end-Sep and could continue to grow by 10k per quarter as ADSL users make the switch. However, the take-up among corporate
subscribers could be slower, given that most of the large corporates are already on fibre plans.

Lastly, for Pay TV, we expect little change in terms of content and competition. While incumbent SingTel has secured the 2013-2015 Barclays Premier League (BPL) rights on a non-exclusive basis (which means that it is not required to share the content with its rivals), StarHub could still put in a bid.

However, we do not believe that StarHub would want to over-pay for BPL rights and we do not think that its Pay TV business would be too badly affected if it does not secure BPL rights again.