Singapore telcos struggling to eke out much growth

Industry mobile revenues to grow a measly 1.8%.

According to BNP Paribas, Singapore's industry mobile revenues should grow a modest 1.8% this year.

Here's more:

The Singapore mobile market is already highly mature in terms of subscriber penetration as well as the adoption of mobile data services. Due to its high income levels and attractive handset subsidies, Singapore has the highest smartphone penetration in Asean at 67% at the end of last year.

While the introduction of tiered data pricing plans in late 2012 was a positive move by the industry to better monetise data traffic and weed out abusive data users, the boost to 2014-15E top line and earnings growth is not likely to be substantial, especially for Singtel and Starhub, in our view. 

Our estimates suggest that these tiered data plans will only boost revenues by 0.3% and 1.1% for Singtel and Starhub respectively, in 2015 vs the base 2012 year.