TPG has painted a clearer picture of the impact of ceasing the rollout of its mobile network had on its financials, with net profit dipping more than $150 million.
The telco revealed in January that it had pulled the plug on building its own mobile network after the federal government banned using Huawei equipment to build 5G networks, resulting in a $227.4 million hit to TPG's earnings.
That $227.4 million hit was rolled into TPG's half-year results for the six months to 31 January 2019. Net profit took the biggest hit, down 76.4 percent to $46.9 million, while EBITDA, which didn't include the mobile network impairment, was up 1.7 percent to $420 million.
The company said gross profit declined mostly due factors related to the NBN, in particular broadband gross margin erosion and the loss of home phone voice revenue.
Revenue from the consumer business, by far TPG's largest segment, fell $28 million to $852.6 million while EBITDA dropped from $255 million to $243 million, again attributed to difficulties with the NBN.
The corporate segment however fared much better, with revenue growing from $374 million to $382.2 million and revenue rising from $158.7 million to $182 million. The company said the main driver was contracts to provide fibre services to Vodafone, the telco it plans to merge with later this year, as well as a shift towards deriving revenue from TPG's own infrastructure.
Data internet services were still by far the biggest product in TPG's corporate segment, with revenue growing to $298.2 million in the half-year, followed by $58.1 million in voice and $26.9 million from the legacy iiNet business.
Overall internet subscribers reached 1.92 million, down from 1.93 million at the end of July 2018. Of those customers, 988,000 were connected to the NBN, followed by 725,000 on-net ADSL customers. TPG also counted 430,000 MVNO subscribers.
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