Optus has blamed a reduction in low-margin hardware sales for a small decline in its ICT and managed services revenues in the third quarter but was unconcerned by fall.
Chief executive Paul O'Sullivan told CRN that its ICT and managed services reporting line was "made up of a number of different project and ongoing annuity revenue streams".
"It makes the [reported revenue] number very lumpy [between quarters]," he said.
The reporting line included products such as services provided to manage a customers' wide area network or to help a customer transition to new infrastructure, which might involve deploying new hardware such as routers and switches.
Optus reported today a total fixed revenue decline of 2 percent year-on-year in its business and wholesale division, which includes ICT and managed services.
Although Optus Business fixed voice traffic was up, driving revenue growth of 7.3 percent to $104 million, the gain was offset by the fluctuations in ICT and managed services.
In addition data and IP revenues were down 0.7 percent, mainly due to Optus' exit from "legacy data products".
However, the business and wholesale result didn't weigh too heavily on Optus' overall quarterly figures, which saw operating revenue up 3.6 percent.
And the telco reported strong growth in its mobile division, with total revenue up 6.9 percent to $1.56 billion.
Optus added 88,000 new mobile customers in the quarter and 92,000 wireless broadband customers.
However, it experienced a net decline of 62,000 prepaid mobile customers in the quarter due to increased churn from its 'International Calls for Less' program which it launched in November 2009.
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