By Graham K. Rogers

SingTel are claiming a stable performance in the third quarter financial results that have just been released, but there are some losses. These are mainly due (they claim) to "exceptional charges of S$67 million, including Optus' ex-gratia payments for the restructuring of its workforce and accelerated depreciation charges related to Globe's network modernisation and IT transformation programs."

In addition, weaker foreign currencies, helped push net profit down to S$827 million - a decline of 8% - with a similar 5% decline in group revenue to S$4.60 billion. If the exceptional charges are excluded the damage was less, with only a 2% decline in profits to S$874 million.

The press release adds that Singapore revenue grew 1% to S$1.70 billion because of contributions from its new digital services and continued strength of its mobile and ICT businesses. In addition, revenue from mobile communications increased 3% to S$507 million with SingTel adding 63,000 mobile customers in the quarter. Its total customer base is now reported as 3.76 million: a leading market share of 46.6%. Overall, the Group had 473 million mobile customers, an increase of 39.2 million or 9% from a year ago.

Although the group is restructuring in Australia to provided growth to the Optus operation, figures there are reported as stable, but show a 6% decline in revenue to A$2.28 billion.

The Group's regional mobile associates, in particular Telkomsel and AIS, recorded robust growth, which were partially offset by lower earnings from Airtel and the weaker regional currencies. Pre-tax earnings grew 1% to S$455 million and would have increased 11% if exchange rates were unchanged from a year ago.

In addition, AIS delivered another quarter of strong performance, with growth in both voice and non-voice revenues. Non-voice revenue rose a strong 33% as mobile data usage continued to rise. It also recorded lower depreciation, amortisation and finance costs on reduced capex. In Singapore Dollar terms, the Group's share of pre-tax profit rose 24% to S$105 million. Its customer base grew 7% from a year ago to 35.7 million.

In Singapore there has been progress in providing LTE (4G) services and the whole island will be covered by March this year. In Australia, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and the Gold Coast now have LTE services.

A number of comments from the group CEO, Ms Chua Sock Koong, were in the press release, including, "We are executing our transformation plan to grow in the new digital era, exploiting opportunities in mobile data and enterprise ICT services to grow our share of the customer wallet."

More information, including a table of the financial results is available in the Press Release that is viewable online .

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.