Australia's Telstra increased its net profit for the half-year ending in December by 21.7% to A$2.1 billion ($1.63 billion), as the incumbent operator grew its mobile business and stemmed its fixed-line losses.
Total income grew 1.6% to A$13 billion, with mobile revenue up 9.6% to A$5.3 billion, and Telstra added 366,000 new retail mobile customers during the half-year period.
The company extended its 4G coverage to 90% of the Australian population, and aims to increase that to 94% by the middle of this year.
Telstra also made progress with its ambitious plan to deploy a Wi-Fi network covering over 2 million hotspots, to be mostly provided by the operator's existing fixed broadband customers. The company has now activated more than 1,000 hotspots for the network.
Fixed data revenue meanwhile grew 7.8%, and higher adoption of bundled plans led to the lowest rate of decline for fixed voice revenue in five years, at 6.9%. Total fixed revenue fell 1.7% to A$3.5 billion.
Network applications and services (NAS) revenue climbed 18.1% to A$1 billion, with international NAS revenue up 18.1% to A$41 million. During the half-year, Telstra settled on the terms of its NAS joint venture in Indonesia with Telkom Indonesia.
Telstra has maintained its guidance for the full financial year ending in June of low single-digit income and ebitda growth. Excluding impacts related to the sale of Hong Kong mobile unit CSL to HKT, the company expects income and ebitda for the year to be broadly flat.