TM to complete broadband speed upgrades by year-end

KUALA LUMPUR: Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) aims to complete broadband speed upgrades by year-end in line with the government’s Budget 2017 mandate to double broadband speeds.

Speaking after the group’s AGM yesterday, TM deputy CEO Datuk Bazlan Osman said to date, 22% or 640,000 Unifi customers have had their broadband speeds upgraded.

“The broadband speeds will be upgraded in phases according to network availability.

“This service upgrade has no major impact on our average revenue per user (arpu) as the higher broadband speeds will entice more subscriptions to our value added services, such as security and surveillance, and premium channels on HyppTV,” he said.

TM expects 3%-4% growth in its revenue for the financial year ending Dec 31, 2017, driven by its convergence services.

Bazlan added that the convergence services entails going beyond connectivity, with Internet data services and value added services like cloud storage and management.

“We have just established our Iskandar Puteri Data Centre (IPDC), and we are going to complete another data centre in the Klang Valley by year-end, if not, early next year.

“The group’s earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) is expected to remain the same for this year, as we are currently in investment mode.

“We are investing in 4G LTE, value added services, data and data centre, cloud services, Unifi, as well as marketing activities for webe,” said Bazlan.

In addition, TM is targeting to have 8%-10% of its household base to subscribe to its mobile service webe.

The group has already secured 2% of its 2.66 million customer base as webe users.

Bazlan explained that the strategy behind webe was not for it to solely be a mobile operator.

The group has launched webe for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and will later extend webe to larger companies and ultimately the government.

TM expects to share the number of households and businesses subscribed to webe in the announcement of its first quarter results soon.

TM has allocated capital expenditure (capex) amounting to 30%-35% of group revenue.

Last year TM spent 27.5% of its revenue on capex, which translates to RM3.3bil.