KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 19 — A Maxis Bhd posted RM680 million in pre-tax profit for its third quarter ended Sept 30, 2016, up 20 per cent when compared with RM566 million registered in the same quarter last year.

Revenue stood at RM2.15 billion versus RM2.16 billion previously.

“We had solid operational and financial progress this quarter,” Chief Executive Officer Morten Lundal said in a statement today.

Earlier, Maxis in a filing to Bursa Malaysia, reported that prepaid service grew 6.6 per cent, quarter-on-quarter, to RM1.02 billion.

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“The quarter’s strong prepaid performance was mainly supported by significant mobile internet (MI) growth,” said the telecommunication company.

The new HOTLINK FAST pack surpassed 1 million users and continued to attract high mobile internet average revenue per user (ARPU).

As a result, prepaid ARPU was higher at RM41 per month (Second Quarter 2016: RM38) and MI penetration grew to 55 per cent versus 52 per cent,” it said.

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Maxis’ total mobile subscription in third quarter stood at 10.903 million, of which postpaid accounted for 2.678 million, prepaid 8.9 million and wireless broadband amounted to 218,000.

“It’s again amazing to see how data consumption is exploding. Clearly, Malaysians love data. From an average of 2.5GB of data consumed per month last quarter, our customers are now using 3.1GB per month on average, especially driven by video usage,” said Lundal.

He said Maxis had great response from its massive auto-upgrade of data for MaxisONE plan (MOP) customers and shareable DataPool introduced last quarter.

“In the last 12 months alone, we added over 800k MOP customers, with the  base now approaching 1.5 million,” he said.

It said the group continued to register solid 4G LTE adoption momentum ending the quarter with 4.1 million users versus 3.5 million users in the second quarter, who consumed an average 4.4GB per month versus 3.7GB in the previous quarter.

“These represent an increase of 1.9 million and 2.1GB per month respectively, from a year ago.

“4G LTE population coverage has reached 88 per cent on comparable peer basis and the group continued to lead the market in terms of coverage, quality and best digital experience,” the statement said.

For the cumulative nine months, pre-tax profit rose to RM2.06 billion from RM1.78 billion, while revenue stood at RM6.39 billion against RM6.42 billion before.

Maxis share prices was down two sen at RM5.99 at midday break. — Bernama