Telstra records 9.4% drop in reported revenue for H1 FY22

Australia’s Telstra has reported its financial results for the first half of its current financial year – ending 30 June 2022 – claiming to have seen ‘continued growth in its underlying business, with particularly strong performance in mobiles’. Nevertheless, in the six-month period ended 31 December 2021 Telstra reported a total income of AUD10.98 billion (USD7.8 billion), a 9.4% year-on-year decline, attributable in part to a decline of ‘around AUD450 million in one off NBN receipts and around AUD200 million in NBN commercial works’. Reported EBITDA, meanwhile, fell 14.8% on an annualised basis to AUD3.47 billion, although Telstra was keen to note that underlying EBITDA was actually up by 5.1% y-o-y. Net profit also fell in the half-year period under review, declining to AUD698 million in H1 FY22, compared to AUD1.09 billion in the corresponding period a year earlier.

With regards to operational indicators, Telstra reported a total of 20.049 million ‘retail mobile services in operation’ as of 31 December 2021, up from 19.029 million a year earlier, with wholesale mobile subscriptions increasing to 1.838 million (Dec-20: 1.652 million). Of note, Telstra claimed to have continued to expand its 5G network coverage, reporting that its infrastructure now covers ‘more than 77.5% of the population’, while also saying it had ‘almost 2.8 million 5G devices connected’. By comparison, in the fixed sector Telstra reported that at end-2021 it had a total of 3.590 million subscriptions to either a standalone fixed broadband service or a fixed broadband service bundled with fixed voice, compared to 3.656 million a year earlier. Standalone fixed voice subscriptions declined to 492,000 by the end of the reporting period, down from 579,000 as of 31 December 2020.