Optus’s catastrophic outage appears to have led to mass sacking at the national carrier with their latest financials revealing that they have taken to culling people and jobs.
The massive meltdown of the Optus network kas led to parent Company Singtel who were blamed for the network failure already out of pocket to the tune of $61.2m because of the outage due in part to having to pay compensation to affected businesses in Australia.
The results released on a Friday which is seen as a day to minimise bad news, has revealed sweeping redundancies, with “staff restructuring costs” coming in at $S18m compared with $S2m in the prior period.
Kelly Bayer Rosmarin (seen below) resigned as the chief executive of Optus in the wake of the nationwide outage that took down phone and internet services for 14 hours during peak business periods.
SingTel, blamed Optus’s national shutdown for dragging its overall profit down 13 per cent to $S465m ($527.1m).
A class action against Optus and Singtel is still pending.
The shutdown sent Optus’s revenue tumbling 5.4 per cent to $S1.8bn in the three months to December 31. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation eased 1.8 per cent to $S465m.
“In this quarter, trading momentum in Optus was disrupted by a network outage. Operating revenue was down 2 per cent with continued weakness in the enterprise fixed business as a result of churn and price erosion,” the company said.
“The Optus team has taken steps to increase network resilience since November’s outage. We are confident that our strong balance sheet and our priorities to improve the operational efficiencies of our core business and scale our growth engines will drive long-term value and returns,” he said.
A previous data breach cost the telco $140m.
The Australian claims that analysts estimated that shutdown could end up costing Optus $400m, with one of Asia’s biggest banks, Maybank, basing its calculations on past network meltdowns.
One piece of good news was that mobile revenue grew 2.3 per cent to $1.43bn.
The business added an extra 228,000 customers, with its overall customer base growing 2.2 per cent to 10.5 million. It’s not known how many of their new customers came via their relationship with Harvey Norman.
Questions are now being raised as to who will replace Kelly Bayer Rosmarin, one person spoken about is the former head of Samsungs mobile business Gary McGregor.
Earlier this month Danielle Keighery, who was set to take on a senior role as Communications Director at Optus, notified the carrier after accepting the job that she had decided to take a senior role at Qantas as head of marketing and corporate affairs.
Optus chief financial officer Michael Venter is currently the interim CEO.
