Digi has just announced its Q1 2016 results and they currently have the most mobile subscribers at 12.34 million. That’s a 5.5% increase from Q1 2015 (11.69 million subscribers) with net additions 3 quarters in a row. As a comparison, Maxis currently has 12.31 million subscribers according to its recent Q1 2016 results.
For Q1 2016, Digi reported a slight dip of revenue at RM1.56 billion compared to the same period last year at RM1.58 billion. Profit after tax dipped to RM399 million (Q1 2015: RM479 million) but it is an improvement of 4.5% from the previous quarter in Q4 2015.
To break things down, Digi currently has 1.9 million postpaid subscribers with a total revenue of RM464 million in the last quarter. Meanwhile, there are 10.4 million prepaid subscribers with a revenue of RM1.09 billion.
While Digi’s subscription numbers have increased, the average revenue per user (ARPU) is sliding for both postpaid and prepaid. Postpaid is doing better in terms of overall revenue with an increase of 7% (Q1 2015: RM434 mil, Q1 2016: RM464 mil) but prepaid revenue has dropped 5% for the same period. According to Digital News Asia, Digi’s ARPU for prepaid is an all time low according to data that’s available until 2002.
Smartphone and device sales through contract bundling have also hit a low point with only 66,000 units sold in the last quarter. That’s a 66% drop compared to Q1 2015. Digital News Asia also noted that this is their lowest smartphone sales since 2012. In terms of data use, 64.2% of their subscribers are using mobile internet with a smartphone penetration of 61.3%.
Digi is also aggressively expanding its 4G LTE coverage and they now cover 73% population nationwide. For LTE-A, they are covering 33% population with more focus on market centres. For 2015, they have invested RM904 million on their mobile network and RM171 million just for Q1 2016.
So far Maxis and Digi has released their last quarter results. For 2015, Celcom has 12.25 million subscribers and it will be interesting to see if they are getting an influx of subscribers with the recent price war.
