Telstra Next G juggles 13.2m customers

Telstra has added close to one million new mobile customers in the last six months of 2011, bringing the total number of customers on its Next G network to 13.2 million, the company revealed in its first-half financial results.

David Thodey
(Screenshot by Josh Taylor/ZDNet Australia)

In the six months of last year to 31 December 2011, Telstra added 958,000 mobile customers with 338,000 post-paid mobile customers and 436,000 mobile-broadband customers. CEO David Thodey told investors this morning that since the launch of its LTE network last year, Telstra has sold 100,000 LTE dongles, and the HTC Velocity 4G phone has been the third highest-selling handset since its launch last month.

Thodey said that the iPhone 4S had also been a strong performer for the telco since its launch in October last year.

In total, Telstra now has 13.2 million mobile customers, and mobile revenue increased in the first half of the 2011-12 financial year by 10.9 per cent to $4.393 billion.

Telstra added 106,000 new fixed-broadband customers and 206,000 bundled-plan customers to bring the customer base to a total of 1.2 million.

Total revenue for the company increased by 1.1 per cent, or $136 million to $12.5 billion. Net profit after tax increased by 22.5 per cent to $1.4 billion.

Thodey said that the company's strategy to become customer focused has "moved from strategy to results", and is starting to pay off for the company.

The company's network applications and services business revenue grew 19.4 per cent to $579 million on the back of contract wins with the likes of Origin Energy and SA Health. He said that there's some $1 billion worth of contracts being decided in this market, and he said this would be of great benefit to Telstra.

The company's marketing business Sensis, now under the umbrella of the new Digital Media business within Telstra, had sales revenue decline by 24 per cent for the half to $528 million. The company blamed upfront costs of implementing the new digital strategy, and a faster decline of Yellow print revenues than expected.

Labour expenses for Telstra increased by 5.6 per cent to $2 billion. In a raft of changes as part of Project New, Telstra has announced a number of job cuts in the last few months, and although Thodey said that Telstra has also added 400 new jobs in the last six months, total workforce numbers decreased by 221 from the first half of 2011.

The impact of the $11 billion National Broadband Network (NBN) deal will not appear on the company's financial statement, Thodey said, until the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) accepts the company's structural separation undertaking (SSU).

More to come.