South Africa’s Telkom mobile phone unit continues to attract customers with compelling propositions. In the financial year to end-March 2016, Telkom Mobile added 519 913 new customers to it network.
During the year, Telkom increased its customers by 24% to 2.7 million versus 2.2 million in the 2015 financial year.
Its prepaid subscribers rose 19% to 1.9 million compared to 1.6 million in the same period last year, while contract customers jumped 37.2% to 794 272.
“Mobile voice and subscriber revenue increased 18.4 % to R849 million (March 2015: R717 million). This can be attributed to a 23.8 percent increase in the number of active mobile subscribers and a 19.2% increase in blended average revenue per user,” the company said.
The company’s mobile data revenue increased 59.4% to R1.5 billion versus R988 million in 2015, driven by the telco’s strategy to focus on data which led to a 72 percent increase in mobile data traffic.
The mobile business has been a star performer over this phase reducing its EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation)loss from R2.2 billion three years ago to R43 million this year.
Since the fourth quarter, the mobile business has been showing sequential break-even on a monthly basis.
With the increasing demand for high speed broadband in mind, Telkom said it aims to grow our broadband penetration through our fixed-line lookalike LTE services and will continue to invest in this service by re-farming our 1800 MHz spectrum to offer a fully mobile LTE service to our smartphone customers.
