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Aug 09 2011

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Omantel revenue grows to RO 223.3m

11.5pc growth in profit from 1st quarter 2011
MUSCAT -- Oman Telecommunications Company SAOG ( Omantel ), the second largest listed company on the Muscat Securities Market, revealed yesterday the company's preliminary financial results for the period January-June 2011, showing a revenue increase to RO 223.3 million from RO 218.4 million and net profit after tax of RO 55 million (excluding minority interest) compared to RO 61 million in the same period of 2010. On a quarter to quarter basis, for the period ended June 2011, the net profit has increased by 11.5 per cent to RO 28.9 million, compared to RO 26 million in the first quarter of 2011.

Omantel 's total customer base witnessed an increase of 3.2 per cent to 3.348 million while its mobile business -- Oman Mobile -- continued to see significant growth with the mobile network's market share increasing to 56.1 per cent, making again Oman Mobile the fastest growing mobile operator in the Sultanate for the past nine months. On the fixed network side, Omantel maintained its leadership of the market with 95 per cent.

The fixed and mobile domestic retail revenues together recorded a growth of 5 per cent year on year, a quite impressive growth considering the challenging situation in Oman following market liberalisation.
The investments made by the company in expanding its network reach, enhancing the quality of the services rendered to customers and building more cable systems to enhance Omantel 's position as "carrier of carriers" resulted in an increase in expenses by 9.4 per cent to RO 164 million from RO 149.9 million.

Successful employment of 200 new employees approved by Board of directors in response to the Royal directives and the improvement of employee benefits were the second major drive of the increase in expenses.

Commenting on the results, Omantel 's Chief Executive Officer, Dr Amer Awadh al Rawas (pictured) said: "We continued to implement our strategy focused on enhancing the customer experience, resulting in significant investments to expand the network reach, improving the quality of the network and increasing our participation in the international submarine network to strengthen Omantel 's position as the "carrier of carriers".

"We are glad to see the fruits of our past investments, and in particular in the submarine cables business, which is clearly demonstrated in the increase of capacities sold by Omantel to international operators. The increase in revenue generated from sale of capacity to international operators has helped us as well to mitigate the decline in international calls revenue resulting from the actual launch of competition in international gateway operations in May 2010," Dr Al Rawas added.

"We are capitalising by the investments we make in 3.5G network and Next Generation Network to address the potential growth of broadband services and now we already have over 274K broadband customers, an increase of 67 per cent compared to the same period of last year," Dr Amer concluded.

Omantel said that these results are preliminary and are subject to the Board of Directors approval in its next meeting which will be held within the statutory period set by Capital Market Authority (CMA).