Singtel sees solid pay-TV growth in Q1
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 09 August 2019

In an otherwise mixed quarter, Singapore operator Singtel has bucked a global trend for pay-TV by growing its customer base in the segment.

Overall at the end of its first quarter of the current financial year ended 30 June 2019, Singtel reported a net profit of S$541 million for the first quarter, down 35% largely due to losses at teh business of its partner company Airtel and higher depreciation and amortisation costs in network and spectrum across the Group. Excluding Airtel , net profit would have slipped by 3%. Operating revenue rose 2% in constant currency terms to S$4.11 billion on growth in the Australian consumer market and the group’s digital businesses which continued to scale.

In its local market, revenue from fixed services was down 3% year on year, excluding contributions from the 2018 FIFA World Cup broadcast in the prior period.

Pay-TV customers increased by 1,100 on a sequential quarter basis. This led to a total of 382,000 Singtel TV customers at the end of Q1 (five thousand fewer than at the end of the first quarter of the previous year) and 130,000 on-the-go service customers who had signed up for the Cast OTT and Singtel TV Go companion apps. The latter service was up 10% on a quarter-by-quarter basis and 19.2% compared with the first quarter a year earlier.