Maxis, Malaysia’s biggest mobile operator, has posted a 5.0% fall in quarterly earnings despite dominating customer growth in the market.
It has reported a post-tax profit of 532 million ringgit (€133 million) for the second quarter, with revenue up 2.3% over Q2 last year to 2.2 billion ringgit and underlying revenue 2.8% higher.
Ebitda was off 1.7% to 1.0 billion, with ebitda margin down 4.1 percentage points to 46.9%, mostly because of higher costs. Sales and marketing costs as a proportion of total spending grew from 4.1% a year ago to 5.2%.
CEO Sandip Das said Maxis had become the market leader in mobile broadband, adding 135,000 customers for the period. It now has 6.7 million mobile internet subs and data accounts for 36.6% of mobile revenue, up from 34.8% in Q1.
It added 280,000 net customers for the quarter to take its total to 12.97 million, snaring 47% of total net adds in Malaysia over the last four quarters.
It says it “on target” to launch a next-gen broadband network using GPON gear supplied by Huawei. The company has spent 1.2 billion on capital equipment this year.