If you are subscriber of Optus, there’s good news for you. The Telco announced it has plans to launch new broadband and content bundles in the coming year. Allen Lew, the CEO of Optus said fixed-broadband business, which is at a point of saturation right now, will be on the company’s main focal point.
In his own words “Over Christmas we will have an aggressive offer for our HFC network and the market can expect something very exciting coming out from Optus in the early part of 2015 as well.” Optus has recently revealed its fixed broadband subscriber base is 1 million customers, which is 0.1% higher than previous subscriber base.
Optus is the second largest telecom company in Australia. In the first half of this year, Optus made a profit of $394 million, which was up 2.3% from the previous year. The third quarter profit of Optus in 2014 was up 5.4% owing to a rise in company’s 4G customer base. Optus currently has 9.40 million customers. This indicates a slump because six months ago, Optus’s customer base was 9.432 million.
The drop in the number of customers is due to a decline in the number of mobile broadband subscribers. Customers these days are increasingly moving to one mobile plan across different mobile devices.
Meanwhile, the number of 4G customers saw an increase by almost 320,000 between July and September. In July, the number was 2.43 million and in September it rose to 2.75 million. The reason behind this surge is aggressive marketing initiatives taken by Optus. Optus has introduced changes in its products. One of them is sharing data across various mobile devices.
Truth is, Optus was somewhat compelled to take such initiatives because in the second quarter, Optus’s year-over-year profit fell 1.8% to $164 million. Mr. Lew said Optus would partner with different companies to provide digital content on mobile devices. The partnership will be made with content producers and Optus will distribute it to its users.
Mr. Lew said “Partnerships from some of the content or service providers will have to be very, very local which means it’ll have to have information about what is happening in Australia within the cities and towns….” Optus is hoping localized content will retain its existing customer base and bring new customers. But for that, Optus needs to swell its mobile customer base.