For the full year ended Dec 31, 2023, StarHub posted a 140.4 per cent rise in net profit to S$149.6 million, while revenue rose 2 per cent to S$2.4 billion.
The company had set an interim milestone to achieve S$150 million in net profit by FY23 when it launched Dare+ in 2021.
Chief financial officer Dennis Chia said that the company has about S$80 million in Dare+ expenditure this year.
With these expenses accounted for, the company has guided for a dividend of at least S$0.06 in FY24. It has also reiterated its commitment to distributing at least 80 per cent of its net profit after tax, adjusted for one-off, non-recurring items.
Beyond the company’s Dare+ plans, Eapen said that he will be looking at mergers and acquisitions through two prongs.
Firstly, Eapen noted that the company remains “ready and able” to consolidate with other local players. “We have low leverage, we have lots of funding firepower, we have execution credibility…and we have experience in making acquisitions but you can’t force these things. They have to take their time,” he added.
Eapen sees consolidation as a regular feature of every market and a “natural course of things”, with telcos in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand all seeing moves to consolidate in some form within the last 18 months.
Secondly, the company is looking for opportunities to grow its regional enterprise business beyond Singapore and Malaysia in the area of managed services and cloud networking. Currently, the company derives about a fifth of its service revenue from overseas operations under Strateq, Jos Malaysia and Ensign’s regional operations.
“We want to acquire companies that are more cloud native in the way that they do things, and in scale markets in the region, we don’t want to be managing far-flung operations,” Eapen said.
StarHub closed flat on Thursday (Feb 8) at S$1.07.
