Telkom increased its customers by 10% during the quarter ended 31 December 2021, to 16,4-million with a blended ARPU of R91.45.
Both prepaid and postpaid bases saw an increase in the period under review, with prepaid customers growing 12% year on year to 13,8-million and postpaid ARPU growing 1,8% year on year to R215 with a marginal increase in postpaid customers to approximately 2,6-million.
Meanwhile, Telkom’s mobile broadband continues to support growth, with mobile data traffic increasing by 7,9% year on year to 246 petabytes and supporting mobile data revenue growth of 2,6% year on year to R3 127-million.
The number of mobile broadband customers was up 4% to 10,5-million, representing 63,6% of active customers.
The company sustained its fibre growth trajectory, and the number of homes passed with fibre grew 65,5% year on year to 801 084. The number of homes connected with fibre grew by 38,6% to 358 528, representing an FTTH connectivity rate of 44,8%.
Total fixed traffic increased by approximately 23% to 428 petabytes.
During the quarter, sustainable cost management has delivered efficiencies despite challenging group revenue.
Group EBITDA was up 5,4% to R 2 881-million, with EBITDA margin expansion of 1.9 ppts to 26,7%.
Total expenses were down by 4,9% with operating expenses declining by 7,7% while the mobile cost to serve ratio was optimised from 30,9% in the prior year to 26,9%.
On a normalised basis, group EBITDA declined 1,4% as cost savings were not sufficient to offset a decline of 2,3% in group revenue.
BCX remains under pressure, with revenue for the quarter declining by 3,6% to R3 769-million.