Telstra has delivered a 5.4% increase in revenue to $23.2 billion, profits after tax profits are up 13.1% to $2.1 billion after the carrier lifted the price of their mobile plans.
There was also a 9.6% lift in underlying EBITDA to $8 billion. The latter was at the very top of the company’s guidance range of $7.8 billion to $8 billion and ahead of the consensus estimate of $7.94 billion.
Telstra shares are expected to rise today.
The growth came from a 15.1% increase in Mobile EBITDA to $4,602 million and an 84.2% jump in International (Digicel Pacific etc) EBITDA to $713 million.
This offset a fall in revenues from Telstra’s fixed businesses.
The carriers free cash flow (on a guidance basis) came in at $2.8 billion, which allowed the company’s board to declare a fully franked full-year dividend of 17 cents per share.
This is up 3% year on year from 16.5 cents per share in FY 2022.
New CEO Vicky Brady claimed “Telstra continues to lead the industry on stopping scams, and our Cleaner Pipes program is detecting and blocking more email, SMS and phone scams than ever before. We are now blocking more than 9 million.
scam calls and around 20 million scam SMS each month” she said.
On the question of consumer security, she said “We have also taken steps to improve the way we collect and retain customer ID data to help reduce the risk of cybercrime for our customers. As a result of customer experience improvements, customer complaints reduced to a record low in the year. Complaints from Telstra’s Consumer & Small Business customers to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman reduced by more than a third on the prior year, and 98 per cent of Telstra Enterprise billing.
disputes are now resolved within one billing cycle”.
