Celcom ends 2017 with growth — breaking a 3-year-long decline

Celcom Axiata invited us for their Q4 2017 business report, sharing with us their progress as a company last year. Celcom reports good progress on all metrics including customer satisfaction and profits.

Customer satisfaction was measured by Transactional Net Promoter Scores (tNPS) at retail has improved to 68 points, two points over the last quarter. Meanwhile Celcom Contact Centres see their tNPS increase by 8 points over the last quarter to 37 points. To further improve on this metric, Celcom aims to refresh 60-80% of its Blue Cube stores by the end of 2018. They are also pushing for a digitization of their services moving forward.

Service revenue has grown to 1.562 billion, with total revenue hitting 1.777 billion, marking an increase of 2.5% and 7.4% each. Out of this total revenue, 43% is made up by data revenue, making up RM767 million. Data revenue has grown by 25% year on year.

The growth was contributed to by improvements in both postpaid and prepaid revenues. This is also driven by higher data consumption which has increased by 17.5% over the last quarter. The current average is 8.5GB per month per active data user, which is also partly attributed to higher smartphone penetration, which is currently at 74%. As it stands, they are now offering 87% LTE population coverage, with fast mobile data accessible from 20 major cities across Malaysia.

Quarter on quarter, normalized EBITDA and normalised PATAMI see a growth of 6.6% and 8.6%, respectively. This quarter, normalized EBITDA is at RM734 million, while PATAMI is at RM336 million.

Celcom hopes to further drive their user base and as a result, revenue, up via initiatives like Super Video Walla, Xpax Internet Plan, Xpax Roaming Plan and Celcom Game Hero, which puts RM300 000 up for grabs on the biggest mobile tournament in Malaysia.

Pokdepinion: Congratulations Celcom! Here’s hoping for more affordable plans from the telco!