The massive growth of Telkom mobile

Telkom’s fixed-line numbers may not paint a pretty picture, but its mobile business is soaring.
According to Telkom’s interim financial results for the six months ended 30 September 2018, its mobile user numbers and revenue figures have climbed sharply.
“Telkom Consumer’s performance was driven by the mobile business, which was underpinned by our capital investment in the wireless network, extension of distribution channels, increased store footprint, and innovative data-led products which have resonated well with customers,” said Telkom.
This resulted in an impressive set of results, including the following:
- Mobile broadband subscribers were up 66.8% to 4,751,688.
- Active mobile subscribers were up 50.0% to 6,545,101.
- Pre-paid subscribers were up 60.7% to 4,877,613.
- Post-paid subscribers were up by 25.4% to 1,667,488.
Along with the increase in subscribers came an increase in revenue, and Telkom stated that mobile ARPU (average revenue per user) was R104.28 – up 12.8%.
This was split into a pre-paid ARPU increase of 33.5% to R70.68, and a post-paid ARPU increase of 4.2% to R191.47.
Mobile broadband usage was also up substantially in the period, and data volumes increased by 120.8% to 159 petabytes.
LTE and FreeMe
Telkom said the mobile unit’s growth was supported by an improvement in its network, which included the number of mobile sites integrated increasing by 27.2% to 4,383.
LTE sites integrated climbed 34.0% to 2,607, while it refarmed 1,800MHz spectrum to support smartphone subscriber growth of 83.9% – to 3.8 million.
“Telkom Consumer operating revenue grew 14.6%, driven by a 53.8% growth in mobile service revenue to R3.57 billion,” said Telkom of the overall financials.
“Our innovative FreeMe plan remains the core value proposition within our post-paid offering. To this end, 41.1% of our post-paid subscribers have adopted the FreeMe product suite as their base plan,” it added.
Telkom said its fixed-wireless access and Wi-Fi continues to do well, too, with a 22.1% growth to over 962,000 customers.
This was driven by the “Deal of the month”, improved quality, and the footprint expansion of its LTE network, it said.