YTL Comms targets half a million postpaid subscribers

In The Edge Financial Daily Today 2012
Written by Nadia S Hassan
Wednesday, 07 March 2012 11:37

KUALA LUMPUR: YTL Communications Sdn Bhd is targeting to grow its postpaid subscriber base to half a million by end-2012 according to its CEO Wing K Lee.

“We are aiming for our total subscriber base to be over one million by the end of the year. However, we will have to see how the rest of the year goes,” said Wing after the launch of YTL Comms YES 4G wireless Unlimited Super Postpaid plans yesterday.

YTL Comms comes under the umbrella of listed entity YTL Power International Bhd. YTL Power chairman Tan Sri Francis Yeoh Sock Ping had been quoted as telling shareholders in 2011 that he expected YTL Comms to break even when its subscriber base reaches one million.

As such, if YTL Comms manages to achieve one million subscribers by the year-end, it means that the company could be profit generating.

Yeoh had also said at the time that he expected YTL Comms to turn around within two years. YTL Comms is currently loss-making, according to YTL Power’s latest 4Q results. For the financial period ended Dec 31, YTL Comms recorded a net loss of RM197 million while its top line stood at RM30.6 million. For the previous corresponding period, revenue had stood at RM4.7 million, while net losses had been RM27.7 million.

YTL Comms has gained a subscriber base of over 300,000 in the 15 months since YES was launched, according to Wing.

Earlier, YTL Comms had announced a target of 400,000 subscribers by the end of 2011.

However, according to the company, while the initial pickup was slow, YES is starting to gain traction on the back of new packages and offerings.

“We have also managed to almost double our number of base stations during the past 15 months.

“We initially had around 1,200 base stations that gave us around 60% population coverage. Now the number has grown to 2,200, which gives us around 70% coverage of the population,” Wing said.

According to YTL Comms deputy CEO Jacob Yeoh, the company is aiming to expand its coverage to 80% of the population by the end of 2012.

“We are hoping to have around 4,000 base stations by the end of the year, which will help expand our coverage by an additional 10 percentage points.

We had also earlier said we were planning to spend around RM2.5 billion in capital expenditure to meet this target,” he said.

YTL Comms is also targeting the education sector, having already signed up 10 local universities to offer its YES wireless service.

“It goes beyond simple marketing, what we are aiming for is making fundamental changes in the industry. We are also looking to add more universities as our partners, going forward,” said Wing.

He added that YTL Comms is also looking at possibly expanding the coverage of YES to include Sabah and Sarawak.

“We are in talks with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) concerning our expansion into east Malaysia. We will announce it when there is an update,” said Wing.

This article appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, March 7, 2012.