Good morning, everyone, and welcome to True Corporation's earnings disclosure for the second quarter of 2026. My name is Naureen. I am the Head of Investor Relations. With me today are our Group CEO, Kun Sigve.
Yes. Thanks, Naureen, and good morning to those of you that came to the room, and also to all of you that are online today. Let me start with the key highlights from the second quarter shown on this slide. You may remember that I told you after our Q4 last year that that was the quarter where we turned down the declining curve and started to see positive numbers again. That is exactly what you saw also in the Q1 this year, and is also now coming true in Q2. In this quarter, our top line is also back to a year-on-year growth, not only Q-on-Q. That tells you that our recovery is working, and it is showing up in the numbers. Keeping up with the momentum from Q4 last year and then now Q1 this year, we grew top line across all businesses during the second quarter.
In mobile, we added 1.1 million subscribers year-on-year and grew 1.6%, while in our online business, we added 113,000 new subscribers with a revenue growth of 1.7% from last year. Just as important, we are turning that momentum also into shareholder return, declaring an interim dividend of 15 satang or THB 0.15 at a 79% payout ratio for the second quarter. Turning to this slide. There is an important balance in what we are trying to do. We are focusing on a disciplined growth, improving customer momentum, and ensuring also a better performance translate into return for shareholders, while we are remaining committed to our long-term financial targets, including our leverage target. Then I can turn to next slide, and before we go deeper into the second quarter, I want to show you some of the trends that I just talked about over the last six quarters.
This slide captures the balance we are trying to achieve. A balance with rebuilding the top-line momentum while maintaining the financial discipline needed to also grow our EBITDA. On the left-hand side of this slide, we are showing you the service revenues excluding domestic roaming and seasonal concept revenues, which gives a better and clearer view of the underlying business trends. As you know, the three first year after amalgamation, our focus was on cost synergies and implementing a single network to be competitive also on the network experience. During most of 2025, service revenue was under pressure, as you can see on this slide. This was also partly due to our network outage, and also softness in our B2B and pay TV business.
As already mentioned, the turning point came in Q4 last year, since then, the recovery has been driven mainly by steady improvement in mobile and online. In Q2, service revenues grew 0.5% quarter-on-quarter. It is still early, but it shows that the recovery that we started with last year is now gradually also coming and becoming visible in the numbers. Mobile and online continue to drive growth, supported by better subscriber momentum, but also a more focused commercial execution. At the same time, we are realistic that not all areas are recovered at the same pace. I am not happy with the B2B business, I am not happy with the pay TV either. Both of them are quite soft, we need now to also turn those around to contribute to our top-line growth.
As a result, we are also revising our guidance for service revenues for 2026, which will be covered in detail during Kun Nakul's presentation. The other part of this slide. We lost the slide, I think. It is about EBITDA is a story of resilience. Even as synergy benefits now are fading out, we are continuing to manage OpEx carefully and protecting earnings quality. As I have said several times, our ambition is to see a flat OpEx going forward. We are not there Q-on-Q. We are a little bit increased EBITDA in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, but our ambition is to keep that flat going forward. This is a part of our transformation journey, where we are applying AI and digitalizing our operation to bring down our cost.
EBITDA grew 1.1% Q-on-Q in Q2, our EBITDA guidance remains, for the year, unchanged despite the downward revision to our top line. For me, this is an important point because the company is moving from a phase where performance was heavily driven by synergy capture into a phase now where execution, customer experience, and disciplined growth need to carry the momentum going forward. We are beginning to see some early signs of this transition. Top line is recovering, EBITDA remains on track, we continue to operate with discipline despite a more uncertain macroeconomic environment. This is the foundation of what we try to build on. Better customer momentum, continued cost focus, and steady delivery against our medium-term targets. Let me talk a little bit about macro. The first half of 2026 was characterized by a high degree of macroeconomic uncertainty.
Tourists remain under pressure, down 5% year-on-year, geopolitical tension affect customer sentiment. As you know, Thailand is a consumption-driven economy, so when consumers and businesses become more cautious, that naturally create also headwinds across many sectors, including telecommunication. For us, we especially see this in the B2B segment. Our approach, it is let us focus then on something we can do something with because the macro headwinds is out of our control. So we focus then on customer experience, commercial execution, cost discipline, and operational resilience. At the same time, we continue to manage cost very carefully because maintaining financial discipline remains our key priority, especially in an environment where revenue growth across the economy remain uneven. We have also then taken proactive measures in managing risk across our supply chain.
Given the level on the CapEx, given the level of global uncertainty, we work very closely with our main network partners, being Huawei, Ericsson, and ZTE, to secure equipment deliveries and reduce potential disruption to our network modernization and transformation programs while we continue to be very focused on our committed CapEx framework. While uncertainty remains, forecast for Thailand GDP now, it's slightly improved, compared with the first half of the year. We hope that that can give us a little bit more tailwind into the second half of the year. But as I said, we are not building our plans on macroeconomics recovery. Our focus remains on our own execution, what we can do something with. The action we are taking now are designed to strengthen the business regardless of what's happening in the macro environment.
The progress we have made in the first half year demonstrate, in my view, that we are building a more resilient company, one that is better positioned to manage also volatility when it comes to the environment around us. Okay. Let me then talk about one of our big moves. I have explained to you before that we have four big moves in the company, and one of them, and this is a strategy for this year and also going forward, and one of them being the big move on growth. I want to show you two examples in the quarter. Broadband and the home business is moving from volume to value. Our OTT app, TrueID, is moving from content to engagement. Those are the two examples I will talk a little bit more about.
Last quarter, we launched a new personalized bundle plan for our broadband business, MyPlan is what we call it, with the aim of increasing ARPU. One quarter later, the MyPlan accounts now for half of the gross adds, half of the gross adds, with a 23% higher ARPU compared to our average base plans. This is very encouraging. We also, in the last quarter, launched what we call TrueOnline Home Next as the umbrella brand for entire home ecosystem, fiber, smart home, and now also AI services, because we see a growth potential in this business to be more than just connectivity or connecting the homes to broadband. In late May, we also launched what we call AI Pet Care. This is Thailand's first AI-powered 24/7 pet sitter, behavioral insights, and Thai language recommendations, scaled through our partnership with Origin Property.
Just a few weeks thereafter, in the beginning of June, we also launched Ami, which is Thailand's first localized AI home assistant. Our AI services that I just talked about, our home security solution, being CCTV and also TrueX Cloud Storage, is the number one add-ons on what people are selecting in our new MyPlan price plans. That is driving ARPU 23%, as I just explained. In addition to that, these products, they are creating stickier relationships, more touchpoint per household, and revenue that is not purely based on connectivity. Then to the content. Content is becoming one of the levers we have for ARPU uplift. It gives customers a reason to stay with us beyond the connectivity itself, more reason to engage with us every day and more room for us also to contact the customers and move them up the value ladder.
This is how we deepen the relationship beyond core connectivity. On the TrueID side, our OTT app, we are now transforming the business model into a digital ecosystem, which is a combination of content, community engagement, and e-commerce. We have just partnered up with DramaBox. As you know, the DramaBox, it is one of the most downloaded vertical dramas across 34 countries, including Thailand. Together with DramaBox, we launched something we call TATANG by TrueID, a new vertical short drama format, which built specifically around Thai audience, what they are watching and demanding today. What makes this partnership meaningful is that it works in both direction. It brings the best of global content into TrueID, and it gives Thai original content a route also out to the world market.
TATANG is designed to be bundled with True 5G prepaid and postpaid packages, and also to be integrated into the ecosystem of the entire TrueCorp, but also CP business units as a mini app in other business units apps. I also want to talk about the big move we have on AI. It is a little bit wordish slide, but let me go through it. Over the last quarters, we have implementing a lot of AI use cases, but we see that we need to move beyond those use cases if we want to really have a material effect of AI in our company. The use cases are good, but you have to work much more holistically and systematically than just having single use cases. Sustainable AI transformation requires the right operating model.
It requires trusted data, it requires upskilling of people, and it requires a disciplined approach to value realization. So we have tried then to use these five areas you see on these slides to systematically work on all these pillars, to have AI as a much more integrated part of everything that we do, not only cost side, but also on the revenue side and operating model. We have established and some comments on each one of them. We have established what we call a centralized AI center of excellence. We have employed a Chief AI Officer, and we are now looking at the operating model, to change that in a way that we can provide governance standards and share capabilities across True. At the same time, we have introduced a value realization framework to ensure that every AI initiative are prioritized, but also prioritized with tangible business outcome.
There is a P&L plan behind those initiatives. To enable AI at scale, we continue to build a single trusted data foundation that improves data accessibility, quality, and also can be reduced across business units. On people, upskilling of people, we are preparing all our True employees to be upskilled to AI skills, equipping them with the capabilities needed to accelerate our adoption across the organization. Everyone needs to know the basics. Some need to apply it in their daily work, and some need to be highly skilled. With this foundation in place, we have begun also an end-to-end domain transformation to look at the entire domain. We have started with the B2B business, where AI data and process redesign are being combined to simplify operations, improving productivity, and drive sustainable business value. These are factors in our AI program.
You may ask, have you seen any financial outcome so far? No. This is to come, but you will see going forward. We are also going to talk more about the numbers coming out from this AI plan. Another part of this slide, I want to talk a little bit about Arise. As I see it, Arise is not a separate business story. It is an accelerant to True. True in this partnership in Arise, True brings scale, network, brand, distribution, and data. Arise business unit brings technology, platforms, and hyperscaler relationships. On the B2B side, we cross-sell cloud and data center through True IDC into True's existing enterprise base. On B2C, TrueMoney, and now also the coming the virtual bank, extend our reach into consumers' financial services while providing new channels to distribute True's product and services.
Leveraging the scale of Arise and also CP Group, we are able to build partnership with the big hyperscalers. We are building partnership with AWS, Microsoft, and Accenture. We are strengthening our AI, cloud, and digital capabilities, accelerating innovation, building future-ready AI infrastructure together with these global hyperscalers. With that, we are creating the foundation for new growth opportunities across this entire ecosystem. Before I hand over to Nakul, let me also briefly touch on sustainability. For us, sustainability is not a separate work stream. It is embedded into everything we do, into how we operate, how we manage risk, and how we create long-term value. This year we continue to strengthen our standing across major global ESG benchmarks. S&P Global, formerly DJSI, ranked us in the top 1% globally. We are proud of that. CDP Climate Change, we achieved a rating A for the first time.
FTSE4Good, we achieved a leading rating with higher score, 4.8 out of five, showing steady year-on-year growth. MSCI, we were upgraded to rating A, demonstrating our significant progress in the ESG risk management. Bloomberg, we searched to be the leading tier with a score of 4.97, jump from previous years. This slide is important for us, also to see that we are recognized with what we do. Stronger governance, better risk management, greater operational discipline, and a long-term approach to value creation. We believe sustainable business performance and shareholder return go together. These results, therefore, reinforce our confidence that we are building a stronger company for the future. With that, Nakul, let's go through the numbers.
Thank you so much, Kun Sigve, and good afternoon, good morning to everybody, whoever is joining in person here, and also on the call. Let me walk you through the financial performance for this quarter. In terms of the key highlights. We have a service revenue growth of 0.8% year-on-year, and 0.8% quarter-on-quarter, as you can see on the slide. The EBITDA growth is 13.5% on a year-on-year basis, which is continuing the good work that we have done in the past. Also 1.1% growth on a quarter-on-quarter. The reported profit is about THB 6.6 billion, which has grown 3.2x from last year, same quarter, and also is flat on quarter-on-quarter basis. I'll explain more. The leverage, which was 5.7x at the time of amalgamation, as you recall, is now down to 3.7x, which has reduced 0.3x year-on-year, and also 0.1x on a quarter-on-quarter basis.
Lastly, the board of directors have approved an interim dividend of about THB 0.15 , which is THB 5.2 billion at a 79% payout ratio. If I explain the performance of the business segments in a little bit more detail, but first look at the service revenue development. As far as the top line is concerned, as you can see, there is a 0.8% growth Q1 Q and a 0.8% growth year-on-year as well. This growth is basically coming across growth from all segments. Normalized for the domestic roaming revenue, the service revenue has actually increased 1.1% year-on-year, driven by growth in mobile business.
If I look at the revenue development and where the growth is coming from a quarter last year to the quarter this year, as you can see from the middle part of the slide, the big growth is coming in the mobile business, which is about THB 0.5 billion. If I exclude sorry, the impact of anti-domestic roaming, the growth is THB 0.6 billion. There is also a growth in online business, as Kun Sigve had mentioned, about 0.1. Of course, there is a degrowth on the PayTV business, which we know is on two accounts. One, the fact that our EPL was not there, so that's why there was expected to be a decline in the revenues. Content cost has actually declined much more, because we always said that EPL will be net neutral or net positive.
As a consequence, we have a THB 41.4 billion of revenues in this quarter. As far as the total revenue is concerned, as you can see from the slide, the product sales have actually decreased 17% Q1 Q, which is because of the seasonality of the handset sales. The total revenue decline of about 7.5% year-on-year is basically because of the lower network equipment rentals on account of the exploration of the arrangement we had with National Telecom. Of course, the benefits on cost outweigh the reduction in the revenues, as you already know. Going deeper into the business segments. Firstly, as far as the mobile business is concerned, as you can see from the middle part of the slide, there is a healthy growth in subscriber base of about 480,000, of which 407,000 is prepaid and roughly 71,000 is actually growth in postpaid subscribers.
There is also a Q1 Q improvement in the prepaid churn because of the good investments we've done in the network over the past one and a half to two years. As far as the ARPU is concerned, there is a postpaid ARPU dilution of about 0.5% Q1 Q, which we have explained earlier. The reason is the same, is mainly on account of participation in the Ministry of Education Study Anywhere, Anytime initiative, where the ARPU per SIM is significantly lower than the ARPU that we have on the postpaid side. As far as prepaid is concerned, there is also a dilution of 1.7% due to reactivation of low-ARPU subs and also compliance with NBTC regulations. But you see the year-on-year trend is positive. There is a 5% growth on prepaid ARPU, and also there is a blended ARPU growth as well of 0.6% on a year-on-year basis.
As a consequence, you see on the left-hand side, there is a growth in revenue of THB 0.6% of the mobile business on quarter-on-quarter, and 1.6% on a year-on-year basis. If I move on to online, as you can see, there is a 1.7% growth in online, which is driven by growth in subscribers on a year-on-year basis. There is also a 2.2% growth in B2C revenues, which is driven by net plus subscriber addition of 28,000, which is pretty much consistent with what we have seen in the previous quarters. There is also a healthy growth of six path in ARPU, which Kun Sigve had mentioned, is basically on account of the MyPlan that was introduced.
I would repeat that more than 50% of our acquisitions are on account of the MyPlan, and there is a 23% increase in ARPU on account of those subscribers that we are acquiring. The ongoing improvements in the subscribers are actually resulting in an increase in the revenues. Of course, there is going to be a continued investment in the network and improvement of customer experience. This will be seen from the CapEx investments that I will talk about a bit later. As far as the pay TV business is concerned, the story is very consistent with what you have seen in the previous quarters. There is a decline in pay TV revenues, mainly on account of the lower subscription, which is coming on account of two accounts.
Number one, EPL, and the second is the linear TV subscription has gone down regularly on a quarter-on-quarter basis, and we are trying our level best to mitigate with growth in OTT. The subscriber reduction is pretty much similar to what you see in the previous quarters as well, and there is a minor growth in ARPU because of upselling of content. As far as the OpEx is concerned, the story again is very consistent from what you have seen. It is a 28.7% reduction year-on-year in OpEx, which is benefited by acquisition of spectrum and also on the synergies. Let me take some OpEx areas as an example. As far as the regulatory cost is concerned, it has increased 2% year-on-year due to the change in the full year effective rate pursuant to the expiry of the spectrum.
Again, very consistent with what you saw in the previous quarter. There is a decline of about 6.4% quarter-on-quarter, which is basically on account of a one-time benefit, when we finalize the USO payment for the last year, and that is why we trued up our expense, and that resulted in a reduction. As far as network cost is concerned, 27.1% reduction, which is benefited by acquisition of spectrum and the network modernization. While quarter-on-quarter decline of about 5.8% is basically from vendor negotiations. Cost of sales decline is basically because of how it goes with the product sales, as you saw in the revenue as well. The SG&A, it has increased about 7.4% because of the quarterly performance bonus that has been accrued and has increased also 4.8% quarter-on-quarter because of the higher spends on marketing campaigns.
We have often talked to you about the revenue generating and non-revenue generating OpEx. In order to fuel the growth, there has been an investment in the marketing side to make sure that we capture our fair share of growth as well in this market. The spectrum rental, as you already know, has reduced to zero because of the arrangement with NT, and you relate it to the revenues that I spoke to you as well. The other cost of providing service has increased about 4.9% due to seasonal concerts, which you link to the concert revenue increase quarter-on-quarter on the TV. Hence, as a consequence, the total OpEx, excluding depreciation and amortization, declined 28.7%. If I move on to the profitability matrices, the EBITDA growth is 13.5% year-on-year, which is driven by spectrum acquisition and the synergies.
There is also a THB 3.4 billion growth year-on-year on account of the same reason, and the contribution that is there from the spectrum is about 75%, and the remaining 25% is operational improvement. There is also a continued improvement in EBITDA this quarter as well, backed by the revenue growth that Kun Sigve explained as well, of about THB 0.3 billion.
The EBITDA margin to service revenue stands at about 68.5%, which has increased 7.6 percentage points from the same quarter last year. Worthwhile to note, our EBITDA has actually improved THB 8.9 billion since amalgamation, which is almost a 46% growth since that time. As far as net profit is concerned, THB 6.6 billion in profit, which is improving 3.2x on a year-on-year basis. Even though on a reported basis, the net profit looks flat quarter-on-quarter , but the devil is in the details, which you might have already seen.
Let me explain. The net profit in Q2 was impacted by one-time effects of about THB 0.2 billion. The details have been given in the MD&A, and if you want, I can explain it as well. Normalized for those one-time effects, the net profit would reach about THB 6.7 billion, which is roughly a growth of about THB 0.2 billion on a quarter-on-quarter basis. That's why I said it's not flat quarter-on-quarter There was also a normalization on the, if you recall in the previous quarter, of about 0.1%. That's why previous quarter was 6.5%. The financial cost has decreased about 7% year-on-year and also 1.3% quarter-on-quarter, which is basically on account of the reduction in the effective interest rate you will see from the next slide.
The D&A increased 5.2% on account of acquisition of spectrum that you are all aware, and 0.7% from the seasonality, one extra day, and also the CapEx investment that we've had. Overall, if you see the year-on-year development in the net profit, it has increased 3.2x from last year. As far as CapEx is concerned, CapEx this quarter was primarily focused on strengthening core capabilities, of which approximately 45% was invested in the mobile business, 35% in online, which relates to the story that I showed to you earlier, that we are investing in the mobile business to make sure that we are investing in the network and also in the customer experience as well. The remaining 20% is basically IT and others. The total CapEx to sales this quarter is about 10%, and full year frame, we have spent about 30%-35%.
The remaining will be accelerated in the second half of this year. My last few slides. As far as the leverage is concerned, we are down 0.1x quarter-on-quarter and 0.3x on a year-on-year basis, with the net debt basically remaining stagnant quarter-on-quarter at about THB 412 billion. As you can see, the good work on managing the debt is paying dividends again. The effective interest cost now is down to 3.6x, which is down 0.4 percentage points from same quarter of last year. The debt maturity profile is what you see on the screen, but I would also like to mention that we have recently issued about THB 16.5 billion of debentures at a weighted average cost of 2.61%, which is done just a few days back.
We've also refinanced debt quite effectively, and we have been effectively going for callable exercises on the debentures to make sure that we reduce the interest costs as well. Last but not the least, of course, there is an interim dividend that has been approved by the board that amounts to roughly THB 5.2 billion, with a record date of August 18 and a payout on September 2. This is a healthy 15 satang as far as the dividend per share is concerned, at a payout ratio of 79%, is slightly higher than what you saw in the previous quarter. This is the first half development of 2025 versus 2026. As you can see, as far as the revenue growth in the first half is concerned, it's about 0.1%. Normalized for the MT roaming is about half a percent.
OpEx, a healthy decline in first half this year of 29% versus last year, and consequently a decent EBITDA growth of 12%. Last but not the least, let me end my presentation to talk a little bit more about the guidance, which Kun Sigve has already explained. If you recall, our guidance for 2026 was basically a growth in revenues of about 2%-3%, EBITDA growth of 7%-9%, and a CapEx investment of THB 25 billion-THB 27 billion. With the softness that we see in the macroeconomic development, geopolitics has played a part, lower tourist arrival, and also the lower impact that we had from the B2B as well as the Pay TV segments. We believe that we can register a growth of 1%-2% for the full year of 2026 as compared to 2025.
However, due to the excellent work that we have done historically and we continue to do now as well, the EBITDA outlook has remained unchanged. This is prudent cost measures and also risk mitigation because of the macroeconomic changes that are happening. So EBITDA growth remains at 7%-9%. CapEx investment also remains unchanged at about THB 25 billion-THB 27 billion. Of course, you are already aware of our dividend payout ratios as well as the dividend policy. With this, I hand over to Kun Naureen to start the Q and A, please. Thank you so much.
Sure. Thank you, everyone. We will start Q and A with the room first. For those of you who are on Zoom, you can please raise your hand. You can also drop your questions in the chat box. If you are not able to do so, you can please get in touch with me, send me an email or a text. We can start with the room. Kun Wasu first. I will alternate between the questions from the room and the questions online. Those online, please just give us a few minutes.
Good morning, Kun Sigve, Kun Naureen, and Kun Nakul. Thank you for the presentation. My first question is about the recent ownership developments regarding China Mobile and Charoen Pokphand Group. For China Mobile, why are they trying to sell the shares now? For Charoen Pokphand Group, why did they sell the 10% stake, and what is the outlook for the remaining stake?
Yeah. Take the CP first. I think it was back in March that they announced that they will sell down 10%. The reason for that was that they would like them to take the money to finance some other project in the CP Group. What those other project is, you have to talk to CP about. The sell down has happened in two tranches. First was around 5%, and the other one was also around 5% that happened in early July. That 10% is already out. Nothing more, and CP has made it very clear that they want to continue being a long-term shareholder with the current shareholding. Do not expect any more sell down from that. Then to China Mobile.
I spoke with China Mobile as late as yesterday, and they have confirmed that due to some portfolio changes, they may sell down at 1%, but at most 1%. Out of the 8% shareholding, they want to remain being a long-term shareholder in True. That potential sell down of maximum 1% is due to their own portfolio reasons, has nothing to do with neither believe in Thailand or in True. They are very committed to continue to be a major shareholder in True going forward. I am happy that the rumors that we have seen in the market over the last few weeks with that should die down. They have made very clear that they may sell down up to 1%, and that is it.
Thank you.
Kun Wasu, may I request, can you ask all your questions in one go?
Okay. Sure.
Okay. Thank you.
My second question is regarding the SG&A increase of 4.4% quarter-over-quarter. My understanding is that part of the reason for the quarter-over-quarter increase is coming from marketing expenses for Academy Fantasia. Would that continue going forward? Is there a chance for lower marketing expenses in the coming quarters? The next question is about the prepaid competition, which just eased again in March. My question is, when do you expect to see the ARPU uplift from the newly introduced prepaid data plans? On your guidance, I have questions regarding both the revenue and the EBITDA.
You reduced the revenue guidance, citing lower contribution from B2B and pay TV. Why are B2B and pay TV businesses turning out to be weaker than expected earlier in the year? Regarding the EBITDA guidance, you maintained the EBITDA growth guidance. My question is, which areas of additional cost savings allow you to keep your EBITDA guidance while cutting the revenue guidance?
Yeah. Also, a lot of question there. Let me maybe address one or two of them, and then you do the rest, Kun Nakul. On the EBITDA guidance. As I have said many times, I see potential on keeping OpEx flat. The way we are working on that in the company is that we are splitting OpEx in two. Is the revenue-generating OpEx and the non-revenue-generating OpEx. The revenue-generating OpEx, it's sales, marketing, commissions and those type of things. Of course, we need to continue to invest there to get the revenues. But that need to be subset by the reduction in the non-revenue-generating OpEx. We are systematically working now on displacing manual processes. We are working with what we call touch-free operation, meaning that we can run the network, the IT operation, without any human interaction. We are working with cutting cost in all those areas.
That's why you can expect going forward that OpEx will be flat with what I just said. I'm quite certain that we will be able to do that. I was a little bit more uncertain when we started the year, but what I have seen in the two first quarter of the year, I think you can expect us to do that. That's why you should expect EBITDA to grow faster than the revenues, and that's also why we are not changing our EBITDA guiding going forward.
Yes. Then, sorry, B2B and pay TV. It will take us a little bit of time to get those negative numbers into positive territory. We all have taken actions already on what we can do. On the B2B side, it's very much about converting our business model from connectivity, selling data connectivity, into also more integrated IT services. On TV, we are trying to arrest now the decline in the linear TV with moving customers over at the OTT platform. I cannot give you an exact time for when you will see those two business areas turning into growth. In the quarters to come, that's our ambition.
Thank you, Kap. Let me take the remaining questions from you, Kun Wasu. On SG&A increase of 4.4% quarter-on-quarter. This is, of course, as I had explained, we are fueling the revenue-generating OpEx to make sure that we capture our fair share of growth. The area of spends that you've already mentioned, we expect Q3 levels to be normalized now. This can be considered as a one-off, and one-off means spend into the business, but we don't expect recurring spends in this as far as Q3 is concerned. Then, as far as prepaid ARPU is concerned, I think, though I mentioned, let me just say that reactivation of lower ARPU subscribers, basically for the Thai Help Thai program, as you know, it's a government subsidy program. A SIM has to be active for the customers to get the subsidies on their phone.
This, along with the compliance with the NBTC regulations where customer with at least THB 3 in their wallet can continue to enjoy the subscription going forward and accounted as active subs. These two reasons are the fact why the ARPU has declined on a quarter-on-quarter basis. If I normalize the subscriber addition on account of this, the ARPU would be flat Q1 Q on prepaid, which also means there is a healthy growth in prepaid ARPU on a year-on-year basis. Even though reported is 5.5%, if I normalize for this, the growth is even 7%- 8%.
As far as the subsequent quarters is concerned, prepaid has been a growth engine, and we believe that for the initiatives that we have taken in the past, there is going to be steady growth of ARPU going forward. The big growth needs to happen with the regulatory intervention on how we can optimize the price plans, reduce the abuses in the network as well. I think Kun Sigve has covered the rest of the questions, so I will just stop here.
Just add one more point to what you said. We definitely see an opportunity to continue to grow ARPU both on prepaid and postpaid. For those customers that you mentioned, also on postpaid, some of the low, the postpaid customers that is a part of the government programs. To do that, we need to do two things. One, continue to upsell services beyond the connectivity, but you also need to monetize the connectivity itself. In our network, the data consumption have grown around 21% year-on-year, and we are not monetizing that because we still have several of our postpaid packages on unlimited products.
To be honest, there are abusers taking account of that unlimited products and using data. We need to work together with the regulator also to see how can we monetize the data growth 21% in a way that we can get some money out of the investment that we do, but also how can we arrest those abusers that are using that unlimited product in a wrong way. This is something we are working on.
Okay. Thank you, Kun Wasu. Let me move online. Thank you everyone for being so patient. Maybe start with Piyush. Can you unmute yourself, Piyush?
Thanks a lot. Three questions. Firstly, on mobile, just kicking with it, could you share any recent initiatives that you have taken across both prepaid and postpaid, which could help to increase the mobile ARPU in second half? In online segment, when do you think improvement in the network and your initiative on the customer experience improvement will complete? The reason to ask is when do we expect the pace of subscriber attrition to accelerate, in online segment. Thirdly, in the other cost of providing services, what is the proportion of content cost out of it? Just to assess how much of more savings can happen on the content cost side. Thank you.
I can start with the first and the second question. On the recent activities to drive ARPU. First, we see now that churn is dramatically down, and that I think it is because of a much better network experience. We see now that customers are actually happy. We are measuring this, of course, through our network promoter score. We see that both pre and postpaid customers are much less likely to churn because our network position. So that is one. Two, we are working and have been working very systematically with the inflow. We are not aggressively migrating prepaid customer to postpaid. That will reduce in the churn. We are trying to increase our distribution footprint into villages where we have an ability to get quality customers in, not rotating customers. Three, I will say that the way we are working with what we call our customer value program.
This is probably the biggest impact of AI so far, where we are taking our customers into micro segmenting model, understanding their behavior, understanding what they could use, and also understanding how to communicate with them. We see that those customers that we are working with here, and it is still early days. We have done this only for four, five months. We see that we are able to increase ARPU when we do that systematically. So all these are our ARPU drivers, and this is what we are working on in the coming quarters and in the coming months. On the network, on the online side also very systematically working with the price plans. We used to have quite heavily discounted price plans. Those discounts are out and replaced by the MyPlan that I talked about.
We also use the MyPlan to upsell on other products than connectivity, and I talked about that in my intro. We are also working on reducing churn. We are not yet very aggressive on the inflow. The reason for that is that it takes time for us to build the quality broadband network as we have done on the mobile network. Currently, we are using, as Kun Nakul said, around 35% of our CapEx to actually build a solid online network. We do that now cluster by cluster. But before we are confident on the network quality, and that will take us some more quarters. I think you can assume the rest of this year. Then we will more aggressively also increase the inflow of the customer. So that is what you can expect, I think, on initiative going forward.
All right. Thank you. Piyush, if I just may add on the ARPU comment that Kun Sigve made. If we normalize for the Ministry of Education SIMs that we were able to acquire, because of the Study Anywhere, Anytime program, which have low ARPU, then there is a growth in postpaid ARPU in this quarter. As you can see, there is a growth in revenue, so there is a growth in ARPU and postpaid, which is exactly for the reasons that Kun Sigve has mentioned. Then on the other cost of providing services, of course, from THB 4.5 billion last year, it has reduced to THB 4 billion, you can say primarily on account of EPL not being there. So that is a very big contributor. The Q1Q increase of about THB 0.2 billion is basically on account of the seasonal concerts.
If you see the seasonal concert revenue has increased, hence the seasonal concert cost has increased as well. As far as the split of this THB 4 billion into how much of it is content and how much of it is others, we do not actually disclose that for confidentiality reasons. Thank you. But the way I have explained the changes should give you an idea of how the split is. Thanks.
Thank you. We have Kun Supachai from Yuanta Securities.
Hi, Kun Sigve. Hi, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity. Kun Sigve, China Mobile, you have already announced that China Mobile may exit less than 1% of the stake, and they will commit for the long term, but market still concerned that how about the rest of the share? Maybe they can exit in the later stage. Can you elaborate on that topic? That is the most important question today. I have some detailed question that I would like to know first on the B2B challenge, you say about integrate IT service into customer. How you going to do that?
That is my question. On the True Academy Fantasia, you bring back the plan. I would like to know the prelim result. After you bring it back, would it be good for the company, and what is your long-term plan on True Academy Fantasia? The last one will be on your plan to change the content to engagement. This is very interesting. Which kind of engagement do you want to create, and which kind of engagement that can create future value, like a sizable one? Thank you very much.
Well, good morning. You have to be awake in the morning to answer your questions, but let me try. On China Mobile, yes, I had a very good discussion with the leadership in China Mobile, both yesterday and the day before, because I know that the market was concerned about this. What I can tell you is what they have told us. They have told us that they really appreciate the appreciation of the share price in True over the last few years. They definitely wanted to continue to stay in True for strategic reasons, both for financial and strategic reason. It's due to some, I do not know the details on that, but it's due to some portfolio management that they will be selling down less than 1%. I am very certain.
I am speaking on their behalf, and I asked them if I could say that in the call today, and they said that you can say on our behalf that we are not going to reduce our current stake further going forward. Of course, I cannot answer for the entire future, but as of now, they may sell, but it's less than 1%. The rest will stay. That I can be very certain about. On the B2B challenge, what I am talking about here is then to upsell on the connectivity relation we have with the customers. What these type of services could be, it can be very plain services like SMS services, which we are selling to the transport sector. It can be selling connectivity as a service, meaning specified connectivity network for certain business users.
It can be cloud services, which we are already reselling cloud services from True IDC. It can be security services, and we are also reselling some of the security services we buy from our own True cybersecurity company. It can be even that we are, what do I call it, bundle in services from partners. It can be some of the hyperscalers, but it can also be IT integrators. What we are not going to do, we are not going to build a lot of the services ourselves, because that's going to add cost, and this is not our core competencies. What we think we have a chance to do is to keep the brand that we have, keep the customer relationship we have, add some of these services, near core services, security and network as a service and all those type of services.
It's near core, so that we can deliver ourselves. Everything else, we will bundle and sell in a partnership with others, and then take a growth of that. In this sense, and I said it before, Thailand is a quite immature market for a B2B business. If I compare with other markets, being in Asia, China Mobile, for example. China Mobile, I think, have more than 20% of its total revenues coming from B2B. In Europe, it's 15%-20% of revenues coming from B2B. In Thailand, it's only 8%, 9%. I think both ourselves and our competitor has a room to grow if we do this correctly. I think there is a demand for it, but we just need then to change our business model from just selling plain connectivity services into more integrated IT services that I think the businesses need.
AI, you can put on top of that as one example. AF, we haven't closed it yet. There's still some concerts to go. What I can say is that we are currently selling sponsorships on AF. We are monetizing the voting on AF. So there's a good business model behind it. If we are going to continue with AF or not, that I don't know. That we will evaluate after this season is over. Then we quite quickly are going to move into The Voice. We are also bringing back The Voice to Thailand. On The Voice, you will see us doing an even larger engagement platform, not only The Voice competition in itself, but also more activities between the different Voice competitions. Why do we do this? We do this because we want to position ourselves as owning Thai content.
We are going from kind of being the sport content provider of Thailand, mainly with foreign sport, being the EPL and being some of the other sport rights that we had. That we are then transforming ourselves into being more owning local content. AF, The Voice are examples on that. Local Thai drama are different examples of that. Could be also then that we exclusively are getting hold of some Korean and Chinese content, Japanese content as well. We want to then own that area in Thailand, then we want to distribute that content through two channels. One, it's the long-form videos. That is what we used to do on the satellite and the cable, that we have a TrueVisions Now app to do. So we are trying to migrate those linear customers over to an OTT solution on the long-form videos based on exclusive content.
What TrueID is, that I talked about. On that one, of course, we are competing with Netflix. We cannot compete with Netflix. But we can, if we bring content to our customers that Netflix do not have. On the engagement part, that TrueID, that's short-form videos. What we're trying to do there, it's to have videos that create engagement. That engagement we want to use to partly move people into the long-form drama series that we have, but also to create a stickiness with our consumers that we also can use for e-commerce. Again, we try to do that together with partners like DramaBox that I talk about, but also through what we call content generators in Thailand.
We have the online platform, a YouTube view platform that we work with several content generators in Thailand that can put their content on this short-form video. We think there is a room for us to do that, being Thai, competing on. Again, we are competing with some of the foreign platform players. But we think that there is a room for us here to take a position on that. Yeah.
Okay.
Good question.
Thank you, everyone. We will extend this meeting by another five minutes because there are a lot of people waiting to ask questions. Let's move online to Kun Pisut. May I request everyone, if your questions have been answered, please skip. Let's go to the topics we haven't touched yet. Hi, Kun Pisut, can you please unmute? Yes, hi.
Yes. Thanks for the opportunity. I have three questions. The first one regarding the revenue market shares. Your mobile and broadband revenue growth improved nicely in the second quarters. However, the revenue growth is still lagging behind the competitors. How do you plan to close this gap, and when do you think we can expect your growth to be more in line with the market? My second question regarding some accounting issues. The network OpEx, the first one came down to only 6.3% of core service revenue this quarter, which is at a very good level. You mentioned it came from discounts from vendor negotiations. Do you think this ratio can go even lower? What would be your target or comfortable level over the long term? Also curious about your recent change in the useful life of your network asset, your asset.
Could you explain the reasons behind the change? Also, what was the financial impact in the second quarter, and what should we expect for the impact in the coming quarters? My last question is about the dividend. From my understanding, the dividend is paid from the standalone retained earnings, which were around THB 60 billion at the end of the quarter. However, standalone net profit is much lower than consolidated net profit. So retained earnings may gradually decline over the next few quarters. My question is, could the subsidiary pay larger dividends to the parent company to support further dividend payment? Or are you considering any corporate restructuring or other measures to ensure the dividend can be sustained over the longer term? Thank you.
I can try to take the first one, Kun Pisut, and then you can take the rest.
Yeah.
On the first one. Well, I do not like to comment on our competitor. We are doing what we think is the right things to do. Let me do it anyway. I think if you want to look at the revenue market share, you have to look at the growth quarter-by-quarter, not year-by-year. In the first quarter of this year, I think our market share as a quarter -on- quarter growth was very similar to what our competitor had. Of course, they have a better year-on-year growth because they came with a very good speed into this year from last year, whereby we were struggling, as I showed on our slide. So measure on the mobile side, measure on quarter -to- quarter growth, and I do not think we are losing market share on that.
If you continue to do that, of course, the year-on-year will also then be similar. That is on the mobile side. On the online side, I do not know what they are doing, but I want to see a higher net add on online. That back to the question that I had. We need to bring in more online customers in a growing market, but we have to fix the network first. We have started to do that, and we do it now systematically, cluster by cluster. In the coming month, you will see that our net adds on online because we keep now the churn under control. So you will see our net add on online going up compared with what we saw in the first and the second quarter.
Yep, thank you. Kun Pisut, let me take the other three questions. Your second one was actually on the network OpEx. So, 6.3% of the service revenues. To be honest, we do not look at our spends as a percentage of the revenues. We look at on an absolute basis, keeping in mind the spends that we are doing in the network. Of course, the reduction that you see on a quarter-on-quarter basis is because of the negotiations with the vendors, and we believe this is a part and parcel of the business. We are working with a new procurement company, Kun Sigve has alluded about this earlier, and we get a lot of benefits on account of negotiating existing contracts as well. That gets reflected in lower spends on CapEx and of course lower spends on OpEx as well.
The THB 2.8 billion, THB 2.6 billion that you see a spend a quarter is a normalized spend that is there, somewhere between the two. You can see the trend is expected to be similar going forward, save for the investment that we do into the network as well. On the useful life of asset, we changed the useful life in the previous quarter, actually. Impact is roughly THB 200 million- THB 210 million a quarter.
Full year impact is actually THB 800 million. This is basically a reassessment of life of fiber assets of the broadband business. Now we have made the life very similar to that is there in the mobile business as well. This is due to a thorough assessment from a technical standpoint, also blessed by the auditors and the audit committee. So approximately THB 200 million per quarter and THB 800 million for the year.
On the dividend, yes, you look at the standalone profit of the company, but the way you should see the dividend is we are declaring dividend based on the consolidated profits of a company, keeping in mind a payout ratio of 70%-80%. Leave us on how we can manage to upstream dividend from the subsidiaries to the parent and the parent to the shareholders. But the way we should see the dividend is the consolidated profit of the company, and that is going to be distributed to the shareholders going forward. I hope I answered your question. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Kun Pisut. We move on to Kun Nattapob from TTB Wealth Securities.
Thank you. I will make it quick. I am sorry, I did not want to touch much about this, but about your AI related business and also Arise Digital Technology. There is also some concerns from investor whether True Corporation is pushing for adoption, marketing here and there. But the benefit or the profit basically may go more into the services within Arise Digital Technology while True Corporation will get just a small or lower margin in terms of connectivity business or things. So, whether you can clarify on this or ensure whether True Corporation will get some sizable benefit on this, let us say, AI related business. The second one on TV related, we talked about TrueVisions and also TrueID.
But if I am not wrong, you have the digital TV or basically the satellite TV within True Corporation as well, right? Few channels. Since 2027, I think it is those license expiring re-farm into mobile spectrum auction. But too early to think about whether to shrinking it down, is it still performing well or whether you continue this traditional TV. Lastly, just about the, I think the change in interest rate environment, I think heavy currency fluctuation as well. Should we be concerned about your foreign lendings rate currency or you're hedging to is still work well. Thank you.
Yeah. Let me try to answer your AI and TV question. Well, first of all, don't expect True to invest in data centers. That is True IDC that do that. But expect us to do bundling the B2B products with cloud services, but that is a reselling. Then, what are we using AI for? Some of the use cases I can mention already. They are mostly cost related. We use AI to do predictive maintenance on the network. We use AI to, of course, do AI calls on the call center. We use AI to turn manual processes into digital processes. We use AI to see if we can manage the network operation through a no-touch vehicle with not people. We use AI on the post pay side, as I already mentioned, to micro segment our customers on both prepay and postpaid to do upselling.
We use AI to try to bundle the services in the home. So those are the use cases that we use AI for. Don't expect us to do. In my view, AI is not about heavy investments. The heavy investments is if you do data centers. For us, we may also use AI for selling tokens, AI tokens to our customers. So this is not about investments. This is about actually changing your operating model, increasing the skill of your people, starting to utilize the AI model that you already have there. Yes, Arise Digital Technology is going to move more into the AI business, and we will benefit out of that. I do see ourself as someone that can benefit out of the best of AI without having to burden a lot of cost doing so.
On the content business, we still have a significant number of customers on our satellite business, and on the linear TV. We are not shutting that down as long as we see the customer demand there. But of course, this is a declining business. So where we are investing is then into the, as I said, the digital delivery of this, and that being the two OTT apps that we have, one on long form video and one on short form video. That's where our investment goes. In the future, of course, the entire satellite and cable business is going away. But right now, we are benefiting out of the revenues we get from those customers and the subscriber model that we have with them.
Yeah. Thank you, Kun Nuttapop . Let me take the last one on the changing interest rate environment. Actually, to make it very clear, 93% of our debt is fixed in nature and only 7% is variable. Even the 7% that is variable is basically fully hedged. So you will not see any exposure coming on account of this, save for a hedge which is ineffective, which is generally not the case.
Then, as far as the recent rounds of debentures that we have issued, as I mentioned, we have done THB 16.5 billion at a rate of interest of 2.61%, which is even lower than what we did in the previous quarter. So as you can see, we are carefully and efficiently reducing the spread every time we are doing a new issuance on the debt. Hence, we continue to believe in the story that we will be able to keep the effective interest in check, even if the interest rate environment is increasing. Thank you.
Currency?
On the currency, the effect that we have in the books in this quarter is basically on account of advances that were paid to suppliers many years ago, and those have been settled now. At that time, the rate of exchange was higher, now it is lower. So that is why there is an impact that you see in the quarter. We do not expect a significant impact coming in the subsequent quarters. Thank you, Gav.
Okay. My question is on the fiber side. You talked a lot about data centers and AI. Are you seeing more demand for fiber in the country, and is that an investment that you could pursue? We are seeing a lot of fiber builds around data center hubs globally. I just wonder what your plans are in Thailand. Thank you.
Starting to come. This is actually a discussion that we have as a result of that. We are yet to make any plans on how we want to play in that area. I do see that several of the data centers that are built are both asking for connectivity, also fiber connectivity between them, but also connectivity from the sub-sea cable coming in. This is an opportunity we are looking at, but we are yet to make plans.
Okay. Thank you, everyone. I have to end the call now. We are already 11 minutes overboard. For everyone who is still on the line and we were not able to take your question, I can take your questions now after we go offline. Once again, thank you, and I am happy to take meetings with Nakul as well if you are interested. Okay. We end for today. Thank you for joining us.