Maxis maintains steady revenue in the face of price war

There’s lots of excitement in the mobile space in the first quarter for 2016. Malaysian telcos were dishing out competitive postpaid plans with lots of data, while TM prepares to make an entry with its new 4G service.

Despite the aggressive price war, Maxis remains steady according to its latest Q1 2016 financial update.

Compared year-on-year with Q1 2015, Maxis has managed to maintain a revenue of RM2.1 billion (Q1 2015: RM2,127 mil, Q1 2016: RM2,126 mil). For postpaid, revenue has increased slightly by 2.3% (Q1 2015: RM972 mil, Q1 2016: RM994 mil) while prepaid has declined by 3.5% (Q1 2015: RM1,052 mil, Q1 2016: RM1,015 million). In terms of profit after tax, they grew 0.4% from RM482 mil to RM484 mil.

In terms of subscribers, Maxis currently has 2.7 million users on postpaid which is a dip of 4.5% versus Q1 2015. Meanwhile, there are 8.2 million subscribers on prepaid which is 8.8% less compared to the same period last year. Despite the slight decline of subscribers, Maxis has managed maintained a steady growth in average revenue per user for both segments.

According to Maxis CEO Morten Lundal, one of the key drivers behind its growth in postpaid is their MaxisONE Plan which currently has close to 1 million subscribers. In terms of 4G coverage, Maxis is now covering 74% (Q1 2015: 39%) of Malaysia’s populated areas. This includes 36 key towns and cities in East Malaysia.

He also added that nobody invests as much as Maxis onto their network. They have invested RM1.4 bil for 2015 and for Q1 2016 alone, they have invested another RM160 mil. In terms of 4G LTE usage, the numbers have doubled to 3.2 million users versus 1.6 million users from the same quarter last year. To break it down, 77% of their postpaid customers are on 4G while prepaid stands at 67%. Data usage wise, Maxis customers use an average of 2.6GB a month.

Morten concludes that Malaysian users want data and they want more of it. Moving forward, Maxis doesn’t just want to just provide more data, but also the opportunity to do more with it.

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