ENRICHING LIVES EXPANDING HORIZONS - Maxis

MAXIS BERHAD
ANNUAL REPORT 2011
59
“Our customers are our barometers for service and product
excellence. We constantly work towards giving them the
best value through innovative collaboration. Naturally, we
are building a greater presence in Cyberspace, where our
core customer base spends a lot of time.”
T Kugan
Head of Products, Devices, Innovation and Roaming
On a comparable basis (i.e. excluding the international gateway services) our revenues
grew by 2.1% year on year. Growth was driven by mobile internet, wireless broadband
and device sales, more than compensating for a regulatory reduction in interconnect
revenue, yielding a net revenue increase of RM167 million for the mobile business.
Our non-voice revenues as a percentage of mobile revenues were at 43.5% in
2011 versus 38.1% in 2010, among the highest recorded by operators in Asia.
This came on the back of strong smartphone penetration in our base, superior
network experience and a wide suite of innovative mobile content and applications
from Maxis as well as our content ecosystem partners. As of December 2011, our
base of smartphone users grew to 3.7 million of which over a third use “super
smartphones”, i.e. iPhone, BlackBerry, Android or Windows Mobile phones. As we
exited the year, non-voice revenues reached 45.3% of mobile revenues.
Following our decision to rationalise our hubbing business by cutting back on lowmargin
routes, we have scaled down this business significantly from RM405 million
revenue in 2010 to RM156 million in 2011 with an improved EBITDA margin from
5.3% to 11.5% for the international gateway services. As a result, our reported
total revenues were RM8.8 billion for the year, a reduction of RM69 million or 0.8%
compared to last year.
During the year, two significant regulatory policy changes took place – reduction
in Singapore roaming rates and in domestic interconnect rates – which inevitably
impacted Maxis the most, being the largest operator. Normalising these factors
our annual revenue growth rate on a comparable basis would have been 3.5%.
In terms of our subscription numbers, in parallel to the existing reporting, we
introduced a stricter subscription definition to move away from inflated numbers
reported in the market given the “use and throw” nature of a significant portion of
the prepaid “SIM business”. We now define customers using the networks actively as
revenue generating subscriptions, which demonstrates a better measure that reflects
real active customers. We are now reporting both the gross numbers based on industry
practice and the RGS figures which are used internally.
NATION’S
PREMIER
INTEGRATED
COMMUNICATIONS
SERVICE
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Our EBITDA margin increased by 0.5% point to 50.3%, which is one of the highest in
the industry globally, through cost management discipline and rationalisation of our
hubbing business by scaling down of low-margin routes.
Profit After Tax was at RM2,531 million compared to RM2,295 million in the preceding
year – a 10.3% increase – as a result of the recognition of tax credits of RM352 million
arising from the investment allowance under the last-mile broadband tax incentive
granted by the Ministry of Finance.