Singtel has reported earnings of $954 million for its half year ended Sept 30, double from the year earlier period, driven by better showing from its regional associates and improvements in the operating environment.
Specifically, Singtel’s associate in India, Bharti, has shown signs of a stronger turnaround after being weighed down for years by stiff competition and other market-specific factors.
The better bottomline was also because of the absence of one-off hits taken this time last year.
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Revenue in the same period was up 3% y-o-y to $7.65 billion, led by higher mobile revenue in Australia and also better showing by its ICT subsidiary NCS.
“Despite continued COVID-19 uncertainty and structural challenges in the industry, we’ve entered an improved period of recovery that’s seen business activity return,” says group CEO Yuen Kuan Moon.
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“Our resilient set of results attest to this as well as reflect the strength of our diversified portfolio,” he adds.
Yuen notes that Optus, its Australia subsidiary, is making “steady gains” in its mobile business.
NCS, its ICT subsidiary, as well as Singtel’s data centres, are enjoying “positive momentum” as the business customers step up their digital transformation efforts.
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“This first half performance underscores our ongoing strategic reset to develop new growth engines in ICT and digital services,” says Yuen.
“The pandemic has provided tailwinds of digitalisation that we are leveraging to rebuild our business during this crisis and we continue executing to this strategy by enhancing NCS’ digital capabilities in cloud and data and growing our digital infrastructure to innovate our way through this disruption,” he adds.
However, despite the higher earnings, the company plans to pay an interim dividend of 4.5 cents, versus 5.1 cents paid this time last year. Prior to the pandemic, Singtel has been paying an interim dividend of 6.8 cents for several years.
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The 4.5 cents is equivalent to 76% of Singtel’s underlying earnings for the half year, which is at the upper half of its dividend policy of paying between 60 and 80% of underlying earnings for the FY ended March 2022.
Singtel closed at $2.55 on Nov 10, down 0.78% for the day and up 10.39% year to date.
Photo: Bloomberg
