Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the PT Indosat Tbk 9th month 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. And I'd like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Pak Inder Dhaliwal, VP Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Amber. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. With us on the call today, we have Pak Vikram Sinha, our Chief Executive Officer, Pak Nicky Lee, our Chief Financial Officer, and Pak Ritesh Kumar, our Chief Commercial Officer. I will now hand over the call to Pak Vikram for his opening remarks. Over to you, sir.
Thanks, Indar. Good afternoon, everyone. Before I get into the highlights for the first nine months of 2024, I'd like to talk about staying true to our greater purpose, which is empowering Indonesia. This continues to be guided by our key pillars. Number one, double down on our core business. Number two, become the premium home broadband partner. Number three, leading Sovereign AI, and as I said earlier, whatever is connected needs to be protected, which is our focus on security. While we focus on these pillars, we also embedded AI in everything we do. Our continued focus on executing these pillars has led to strong performance in the nine months of 2024, where we have maintained double-digit growth across all financial metrics as we continue to deliver positive returns to our shareholders.
In the first nine months of 2024, our revenue has grown by 12% year-on-year, and our EBITDA continues to grow faster than revenue, increasing by 15% year-on-year, and our net profit, if you look at normalized for one-off, has grown even stronger, increasing by 73% year-on-year. We are also benefiting from the merger synergies that we have delivered, above what we promised at around $450 million of recurring annualized synergies. Delivering this strong growth is our core business, mobile, which remains stronger than ever. We continue to invest to build out our network to deliver a world-class network experience. This year, so far, we have added around 3,000 new sites, which means adding 2.1 million customers of additional population covered and covering around 370 new villages in rural Indonesia.
Our digital leadership through our digital app, which are MyIM3 and Bima+, have seen an increase of five million new app users year-on-year. As we bring more customers to our digital platform, this is having a positive benefit to us as the average ARPU of our app users is 50% higher than our overall base ARPU, and our apps are highly rated with a 4-plus-star rating on the app stores. Our investment in our distribution to continue the expansion means that we now have more than 2,000 new rural distribution points and around 2,500 new service points to be able to better serve our customers across the country as the perfect complement to our network, where the population covered has now reached 92%.
Finally, our new growth engines are set to lift off, where we have secured customers for our AI cloud services and will start contributing more and more over the coming quarters. We have seen positive momentum, especially with the partners we have brought on board, along with NVIDIA, Google, and Accenture. We are committed to our goal of being a sovereign AI cloud leader. We will have our landmark National Indonesia AI Day in November, which will further drive growth to our AI ambition in Indonesia. That ends my introduction, and I'll now hand over to Nicky for financial presentation.
Thank you, Pak Vikram, and good afternoon, everyone. I am delighted to report strong results for the first nine-month period in 2024 for IOH. Revenue grew 11.6% from IDR 37.5 trillion last year to IDR 41.8 trillion. This growth was underpinned by robust demand for our services, data connectivity across B2B, B2C, and home broadband. We have been consistently delivering high growth at EBITDA level, as mentioned by Pak Vikram earlier, and there is no exception in this period, as the expansion in EBITDA was 14.5%, adding IDR 2.5 trillion to IDR 20 trillion EBITDA for the nine months in 2024. Our continual efficiency drive helped to raise EBITDA margin further by 1.2 percentage points from last year to 47.8%. Below EBITDA, our net normalized profit improved by 73% from IDR 2.2 trillion to IDR 3.8 trillion. This improvement was driven by both top-line growth as well as cost-efficiency realization.
Our gearing level continued to be low and comfortable, with net debt of 0.37 times of EBITDA. Going into, comparing our third quarter performance against that of the second quarter, revenue reduced by 2.2% due largely to seasonality reasons, as Q3 is usually the softest quarter for the industry. This has led to a fall in EBITDA by around IDR 300 billion, and for NPAT, also dropped by a similar amount. Moving on to cost, our overall spending on cost of services, OPEX, etc., together actually is the same as Q2. On a year-on-year basis, marketing expenses are up by 40%, and it looks glaring. As explained in previous meetings, this is largely due to growth in commission and costs payable to distributors following adoption of our new business model.
If we strip out all of those adjustments and normalize the actual marketing spending, it has gone up by only 6% on a life-for-life basis. Moving on to CAPEX. CAPEX spending is tracking fairly close to last year. As you have seen in previous years also, more CAPEX is expected to be booked in the fourth quarter. My final slide is on net debt. It has edged up by around IDR 1.5 trillion year-on-year. This is only due to the timing of CAPEX payment as we catch up on some of the invoice payments relating to last year. That's a quick summary of the finance presentation. I'll hand over the time to Pak Ritesh.
Good afternoon. So nine months 2024, we have seen a drop of around 0.7 million customer base, and our ARPUs have increased around 8.7% year-on-year. As Vikram explained, as in our ambition to give power in the hand of consumers and making sure that we are empowering every Indonesian, we have actually been able to increase our MAUs by five million, which is also contributing towards our better customer satisfaction. And on top of that, we are saving some cost of distribution, and that is actually helping us improve our EBITDA faster than our revenues. Data traffic continues to grow, double-digit 12.6%, but this is more sustainable, and we continue to grow our revenues in line with our data traffic growth. Next slide, please. As I said, five million additional users are actually helping us monetize our digital services and our customers in a much better way.
We have been able to empower more Indonesians by giving them loans to people who are unbanked or underbanked. And that's also actually helping us bring in more ARPUs. The customers who are using our app use 50% more ARPU than the IOH average. So we'll continue to invest a lot of money and time and energy on developing our app because that helps us bring in more ARPUs and more customer satisfaction. And as Vikram also talked about, we are trending around 4.5, which is one of the best in Asia, and to the best of our knowledge, second best in the world. We are the first company in Indonesia to launch a telco-agnostic super app. What does that mean? That means a customer who is not having an Indosat SIM card can still download our app, and they can use the facilities available.
And we have seen around three to four million such customers onto our base that shows that our app is much attractive for the normal customers as well who are not our users. Next slide, please. And we continue to have a mindset, which is a maximizing mindset and being closer to the customer, giving better service to the consumers because we do believe customers are looking for better services. So we continue to invest into our network, and we have added around 21,000 4G BTS. And 2G BTS also continues to increase because we wanted to capture some of the voice data, voice traffic, and hence we'll continue to look at some technology which is empowering every Indonesian. So that's all from the commercial side.
I think just to conclude, this is Vikram. In spite of a lot of micro challenges, softening on consumer demand, which we have seen not only in telco across the industry, in fact, we are least impacted. We stay committed to the guidance which we have given in the beginning of the year for 2024.
Thanks, Vikram. Thank you, Pak Nicky. Thank you, Pak Ritesh. We can have the first question now. Let's go to the Q&A. Thank you, Operator.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. So as a reminder to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. We will now take our first question from the line of Piyush Choudhary from HSBC. Please ask your question, Piyush.
Yeah, hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for the opportunity. Several questions, actually. Firstly, on subscriber base, this has been continuously declining. On the one side, you have been expanding coverage in rural areas. So what factor is attributing to subscriber loss? If you can highlight that and the outlook for the same. Secondly, on ARPU, we have seen some weakness on a quarter-on-quarter basis where ARPU has declined sequentially. What is driving that? And if you can again share the outlook. And thirdly, on the EBITDA margin outlook, your guidance still states EBITDA margin inching up closer to 50%, but third quarter you're around 47.6%. So could you highlight what cost elements you are expecting efficiency? And is this more of a fourth-quarter target, or it's more kind of next-year target now on 50% EBITDA margin? Thank you.
Hi, Piyush. This is Vikram. Let me start with the customer base. I think first, what you see now is because of the softening consumer demand and macro challenges, especially during the transition period from one government to another. There are a lot of social security schemes and a lot of things which were put on hold during transition, which led to a lot of SIM consolidation. So what is happening is people who have two SIMs, they are consolidating and spending only on one SIM. And this is coming from low value and very low value kind of a customer. So this is more of a SIM consolidation phenomenon which we have seen in the market.
But our underlying health, what you heard me and also Ritesh talking, whether you look at our data unique users, whether you look at our app users, whether you look at our daily VLR, is all getting more stronger. So that is why when I say we stay more confident, what we have seen during the time where macroeconomics are challenging, consumer demand are soft, still our fundamentals have been getting stronger. And on the rural customer, we are seeing more serious base first-time users coming to us because of the rural expansion. And we'll keep getting benefit of that.
Yes. To add on to what Vikram said, Piyush, we are also looking at higher growth coming from non-Java market. So we have seen subscriber-based growth. And basically, we report 90-day base. So what Vikram said, our VLR is growing, our data unique user is growing year-on-year. So all underlying parameters are in place. On RPU, it is a seasonal one. Quarter three has always been softer, as Nicky also spoke about, softer quarter for the entire telco industry, number one. And number two, with the SIM consolidation happening, what just Vikram explained about, people are spending more on primary SIM rather than using both the SIMs. So that's how our RPUs have been declining for quarter on quarter.
Piyush, on EBITDA margin, as you know, is a function of a few things: the top-line growth, revenue mix, of course, also how much money we are spending on the cost of services and OPEX. So we've been seeing more B2B revenue getting into the book, right? So in a way, diluting the overall EBITDA margin. But we still see a lot of optimization opportunities for us to improve our efficiencies, adopting AI and the latest technologies to reduce the spending on not only cost of services and OPEX, but also on our CAPEX investments. So we will continue to do that. And you've been seeing we make very good progress in the last two years in achieving EBITDA margin percentage growth, right? While we are not there at 50%, like what we mentioned in our guidance, we are confident we will get closer to 50% in the current quarter.
So thank you for your question, Piyush.
Thanks. Thanks a lot, management team. Just following up on subscriber and ARPU question, so the softness is more pertaining to 3Q. Are you seeing trends improving in October where subscriber base is improving, ARPUs are improving? Could you shed some light on how you are expecting on both subscriber and ARPU going forward?
We cannot talk about our quarter four numbers, but what we can tell you that in September month, our month-on-month revenue, as against August, it increased after the fall of July and August. We see similar trends in the last two weeks also. What we can see is that we have growth in September over August on EBITDA basis on revenues. We have also seen we have increased the prices. That is also giving us some impact on ARPU, and also data yields are also improving in the month of September. Of course, in quarter three basis, quarterly basis is not appearing, but in September or August, it is all positive, what you just spoke about.
Right. Thanks, Todd. And just last one. The price increases were already reflected in September, or it will show in the fourth quarter? And how much price increase you have taken across?
I think, Piyush, what Ritesh said, the trends are looking good. What we need to understand, quarter three was a very unique quarter from a government transition, which was very more unique, while overall quarter three seasonality is always lower than quarter two. But this year, because of the transition from the current government to the new government, a lot of social security, a lot of support, which is more administrative, which was put on hold, and again, it will get started. So we are seeing good traction because our fundamentals are strong on quarter four. And that is why we are confident on staying committed to our guidance.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Arthur Pineda from Citi. Please ask your question, Arthur.
Hi. Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for the opportunity. Several questions, please. Firstly, can we get some color on the broadband user growth and revenue momentum? I'm not sure why this is trending lower Q&Q year-on-year. Where are we in terms of net adds for this space? And second question I had is with regard to pricing, which I think was raised by Piyush earlier. Can we get any clarity on when this was implemented and what delta had been seen on the pricing side? That's the second question. Third, I had is with regard to the MIDI service. I do know that it's gone up a fair bit Q&Q year-on-year. I'm just wondering, what are the nature of these contracts? Are they chunky contracts, or are you seeing this as recurring in nature and should expand going forward?
Maybe just the last one, sorry, it's a fourth question. With regard to the issue on the distributors on pre-activating SIM cards, I was wondering, what is this covered upon further examination? Is this just a one-off, and is the scope quite limited? Thank you.
Okay. Thanks a lot for the questions, Arthur. So first of all, on HBP. HBP, last three months, home broadband, we have been growing our revenues 1% on revenues. In the month of September, we did some IT transformation, and that's where the activations were not happening. And because, as you know, we took over MNC, and after that, IT stack was getting transferred, and that's where some glitches were there. But on subscriber-based growth, the last three months, we are seeing subscriber-based growth, and also on revenues, month on month, it is increasing. And we have seen positive trend this month also. On coming back to price increase, that full impact will come in quarter four. We'll continue to increase price. But yes, we have done some price changes already, increased in the third week of August. But that's not on entire channels.
But maximum impact will come in quarter four in terms of price. And we have increased around 5%-9% on online channels and our own channels. So that's coming back to pre-activation of the SIM card. We have an agreement with the distributor, and it's part of our clause that every month, the distributor gives us a commitment that they are not getting any SIM card getting activated at their location. And we continue to monitor that, and we'll continue to have very clear-cut guidance on that, and we'll continue to give them the guidance that they cannot activate the SIM cards there. And it was a one-off thing which was happened. And we'll continue to improve from here in our distribution. As we said, we are going to have a smaller distributor.
In the deep rural area, wherein the distribution can bring us the phase behind every SIM card, we'll continue to drive that. That is why for the last five to six quarters, we have been hearing us talking about expanding distribution and bringing small, small distributors, getting into direct distribution model rather than working with only 10 to 15 to 20 big distributors. As we speak today, I think in last meeting also, I've just talked about these to have 50 distributors amongst IM3 and Tri b rand. As we speak today, we have about 2,060 distributors, small and big distributors across Indonesia that will make us have much better control on distribution. On MIDI?
On MIDI, the increase in revenue is organic. It's not so much one-off. So we do expect the revenue in the B2B space to grow continuously. So as I mentioned earlier, we get better contribution from the B2B side in the current quarter.
I think, Arthur, this is Vikram. I think to your point on B2B, especially on our AI cloud, AI factory, all the contract which we are getting is minimum two-year, three-year contract. So it is building up a very strong recurring business.
Understood, so if I could just clarify, what kind of margins do you realize on these services?
These services, EBITDA margin is in the range of 30%-35%. But what flows to net profit is a very strong 17%-18%. So that is why what Nicky was explaining, our mix of revenue is changing, especially on B2B and FTTH. It comes with a lower EBITDA margin, but much higher net profit. Because below EBITDA, it has no impact. But on B2C, the EBITDAs are higher. There is a lot of cost around depreciation because of CAPEX loading and all. So overall, if you look at our net profit, that is why we are getting a very healthy growth. If you look at our normalized net profit, it is close to 73% growth year on year.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. We have a next question from the line of Henry Teja from Mandiri Sekuritas. Please go ahead.
Hi. Hi. Yeah. Thank you. Perhaps two questions from me. First one, I think Vikram and also Ritesh mentioned about the challenging macro. So just curious, can you provide us some color on how bad is the impact of the consumer purchasing power in the first half or nine months? And how do you see the trend in the fourth quarter and perhaps next year? That would be my first question. Second question, perhaps more about the housekeeping question. I think Vikram mentioned earlier about the synergy from the merger of Indosat and Hutchison, which now stands around like $450 million, right, which is above the initial guidance. Just curious, where do all the synergies, the excess synergies come from? And do you think we can still see some synergies excess in the future as well? So those are my two questions. Thank you.
Yeah. So on Henry, thanks for this question on macroeconomic challenges. I think this is more specific for last five months, I'll say. Generally, quarter three seasonality is softer than quarter two. But this year, because of the transition in the government, we have seen especially lower middle class. And last 45, 60 days, especially August and September, we saw people who were on the social security net because some of these things were stopped. We were seeing that in our Artajasa because we see all the transaction which goes through that. There also, we saw the impact. So the impact is across the industry. This is something which is whether it is FMCG banking. When I talk to my bank CEO's friend or FMCG, it has been felt across. So the good news is what Ritesh spoke. I think September was little, but October we are seeing more.
In November, again, we expect this to get better, so I think quarter four will be better in terms of especially the government transition. Things will take a little more time to get the full positive impact, but it is getting better now.
Yes. Thanks for Henry. See, we all are operating in an environment wherein we get benefit for the economic growth or slowdown, right? So if you're getting credit for everything, we have to take debit also. During the election day, government pumped lots of schemes in the market, and people were having lots of disposable income before elections. That's where we see quarter one was stronger than what we expected. Just want to tell you about Henry. I think we have been talking about infrastructure building. We are talking about long-term sustainable growth. We as a management team always focus on doing our basics right. Just to give you a color, last year, quarter three, we grew 9% over nine months 2022.
And this year, you also there in this market, you see, despite of onslaught, where consumer behavior was not also good and also competition activity was heightened, despite that, we are growing around 12% this year, year on year. So that shows that we are able to withstand any kind of storm is coming in front of us. Of course, we are part of the industry will also get impacted. But if your basics are strong, then probably we will be able to do much better when things improve. So that's what I want to say here. On synergy value.
Let me take on the synergy value, Henry. I think when we started this journey three years back, the guidance which we gave was recurring value of IDR 300- IDR 400 million range we had given, and we said anywhere between three years to four years. I'm happy to report that in 33 months, our recurring value is more than what we had said before. It is around IDR 450 million, and 80% of that comes from network, integrating the network, and then balance there are a lot of initiatives. Now, this month, we will be closing down our integration office. I think we are moving towards more on transformation and making sure we leverage from our scale, but what the scale has done, it has helped us to get more discipline and also get to a cost leadership.
So there are even more opportunities on sharpening our cost leadership, which you will see in the coming quarters and next year also because we have got to scale. Once you get to scale, your ability to work with vendors and partners and the synergy goes to a very different scale. And we are seeing this in all our RFPs and all our tender processes and all. So that will help us on the cost leadership. But the integration office will get closed this month.
Okay. Thank you, Pak. I think that's very clear. Perhaps one follow-up question, Pakk, a quick one. Can you provide some updates perhaps on the spectrum auction, Pak, from the government? Thank you.
The new cabinet has just been formed, so we have to give a little more time. But overall, at IOH level, we are in a very good position in terms of spectrum holding. So we will wait for more clarity on this. And then overall, we are getting ready for our 5G cycle. And we want to make sure that our migration program, our long-tail program, our radios are fully modernized. So we are ready for it. But I'll be able to maybe in the next quarter share more the more we see from the current cabinet and the government.
Okay. Thank you, Pak, and best of luck for the fourth quarter.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Niko Margaronis from BRI Danareksa Sekuritas. Please go ahead, Nico. Nico, please unmute and go on with your question. Nico, your line is open. Please ask your question. All right. We are not getting a response. Our next question comes from the line of Ranjan Sharma from UBS. Please ask your sorry, from JP Morgan. Please ask your question, Ranjan.
Hi. Good afternoon. Can you hear me?
Yep. Go ahead.
Yes, we can.
Hi. Hi, good afternoon, and thank you for the presentation. I'm sorry, I joined a bit late, so I might have missed it. But can you provide an update on the fiber restructuring that Indosat is pursuing? Where are we in the process? And what is the end objective? Thank you.
Hi, Ranjan. This is Vikram. I think we have seen very good interest level on our fiber project. So we are still in the process. But what I can tell you now, what we have seen, the interest level is extremely high. But in terms of detail on timeline and all, you'll have to wait for more. So maybe end of next quarter, we'll be able to share that.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Marissa Putri from UBS. Please ask your question, Marissa.
Hi, Management. Thank you. There were mentions about some consolidation and increase in pricing for the online channels. So how big was the impact on the consolidation to your numbers in Q3 and the total online channel subscribers to your total subs as well? Thank you.
Yeah. So we contribute around 54% revenues coming from those channels where we have increased the prices. And last quarter, monthly online acquisition, SIM card acquisition I'm talking about, not airtime and packages. Airtime packages contribute 54% of our total revenues. But SIM card new acquisition, we close around 74,000 activations per month for the month of September. But quarterly average was around 65,000. And these customers are primarily giving us two and a half times more ARPU and around six times more survivability onto our network.
Do you have any follow-up question, Marissa?
No, I guess just the consolidation thing. I think you mentioned that there was some kind of negative impact to revenue to overall telecom industry.
No, I think it was consolidation was talked about SIM card, Marissa. I think Vikram talked about. As a result of consolidation, people, let's say, in Indonesia, many of the customers are having dual SIM, and what they do, he may be paying $2.5 to me, but he might be paying $1 to other opcos, and vice versa. They can be paying $1 to me, but they might be paying $2 to other opcos, so what they have done, they have what we report here is a 90-day space, so what they have become silent, the people who are the marginal low-value or no-value customers, so that contributes some base on our but the VLR number and data pack purchases and data users continues to grow even in quarter three year on year. That is stable.
But what we are losing here is the marginal customer who are having absolutely no value or very low value. So that's where we have lost the customer because they're not recharging anymore for 90 days, and that's why they have turned out of our network. But we have been able to hold on to our base, which is producing us results for.
Okay. Yes, thanks.
Thank you. Next is follow-up question from the line of Piyush Choudhary from HSBC. Please go ahead, Piyush.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks a lot for giving me the opportunity again. A couple of questions. Firstly, you have started a kind of lending business also, right? So may I clarify if you also include lending revenue in mobile ARPU and what's the contribution?
Yeah. So we are not booking all the revenue. We book only revenue which is going to our bottom line. And we are working for banks as a channel primarily. And we are providing the data for them to do scoring and all. So this entire year, I think last quarter, I cannot give you the result for. But as we speak today, I think $7 million-$8 million net profit has been flown in first nine months of this operation. And yes, it flows into our ARPUs.
It is flowing into ARPU. So basically, it's the net number which is going into ARPU and flowing all the way to net profit.
Correct.
Okay. Thanks a lot. And secondly, with the kind of free cash flow generation which is happening, is it possible to talk about your dividend outlook? You were earlier contemplating of formalizing a dividend policy. Any update around that?
Yeah. Hi, Piyush. Yes, we are a little late on that. We are in the process of getting our board approval. But as I said, we want to have progressive and sustainable dividend policy. If you look at from the date of IOH has been born, we have been giving dividend every year. If you look at the last dividend, it was around 48% of our net profit. And the way we want to do it is when I say progressive and sustainable, we want to go up to 70%. But the policy, the moment we are all ready, we will share it with everyone.
Great. Excellent. Thanks a lot, Vikram and Ritesh and Nicky. Thanks.
Thank you. I'll now hand the call to Pak Indar for some webcast questions. Over to you, Pak Indar.
Yeah. Thank you, Amber. So we have two questions from Sabrina from CIMB Sekuritas. So this is about our product offering. Are there any plans to further simplify the product offering? And the second question is, how many plans are there previously? And currently, how many plans do we have in the market?
Thanks, Sabrina. This is Ritesh. It's a very good question. We keep on saying the most difficult thing in this world is to do simple things. So we'll keep on simplifying our products. And we used to have thousands of SKUs. Now we are talking about hundreds. And going forward, it will be double-digit. So I cannot give you the exact numbers. But just to tell you one thing, top five products we are focusing more on, where we are getting 85%-87% of our total revenues. And we are also thinking of simplifying CVM products, where it used to be number of products used to be 400 CVM products. Now we are dealing with 40. And further plan is to remove it to up to 20, 25, not more than that. And also on simplification on CVM is also on card.
We are actually moving towards lower gap in yield between CVM product and retail product. It used to be very high. Now we have been able to reduce 20% of the gap between CVM and retail product. This is a continuous journey, not the destination. One thing is very clear. As a strategy, we want to be the most simple and transparent brand in Indonesia.
Okay. Thank you, Ritesh. Hopefully, that answers your questions, Sabrina. Operator, can we have the next question, please?
Certainly. Our next follow-up question comes from the line of Arthur Pineda from Citi. Please go ahead, Arthur.
Hi. Sorry. Just one follow-up question. I was just wondering, in terms of your GPU as a service offer, I think this was discussed earlier in your Investor Day. I'm just wondering how this is progressing. Has there been any commercial agreement signed yet? And what is the outlook for this in terms of contributions?
Hi. This is Vikram, Arthur. Yes, I'm happy to share with you that within first month itself of going live, we have now more than 10 contracts. And the good thing is these are all multi-year contracts. And the average tenure is three years. So we are looking at closing this year. If I close with this year monthly revenue of, say, $6 million in December, then that means that for next year, $36 million is already locked. So we are doing quite well on our AI factory and GPU as a service.
Sorry. Sorry. Just to clarify, you said six million revenues in December, but 36 for the next year. Is that right?
Yes. So yes, this is what. So the way the current trend is and the way our pipeline is, we are looking at closing December and on a close to $5-6 million monthly revenue. And if we look at the tenure of the contract, if I look at the way it is, at least minimum, we are looking at anywhere between $50-72 million, which will be locked for next year.
The 50-72 million is the booking for next year, or that's the order book? Sorry, I'm just a little confused.
Already, if I close December on 6th, then the order is booked. So these are multi-year contracts. So monthly revenue is low.
Understood. Got it. Okay. Got it. Thank you.
All right. Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone. Our next question comes from Niko Margaronis from BRI Danareksa Sekuritas. Please go ahead, Nico.
Hi. Good afternoon, Management. Happy to talk to you. So basically, I want to have two housekeeping questions. You mentioned earlier you're sticking with the EBITDA margin target. I just want to, if you can specify, the 50% EBITDA margin is on the fourth quarter, or you're talking about the full year 2024? I'm just trying to get a sense of the extent of the improvement we should expect in the fourth quarter. Secondly, maybe some KPIs on your fixed broadband business. What is the subscriber base currently and the revenue, perhaps in year to date, nine months? And maybe a bit of insight about, yeah, the outlook for the full year. Yeah. Those are my housekeeping questions maybe. And maybe perhaps later I can pose some other things. Thank you.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello, Niko. This is Nicky. Hi. Can you hear me, Niko?
Yes. Yes, Pak Nicky. Hi.
Hi. Hi. Hi. Thank you for your question. Let me deal with your question on EBITDA margin first. Yeah. So on EBITDA margin, we've given a guidance of close to 50%. And we are not yet there. But as I mentioned earlier, we are still working on many, many good initiatives to optimize our costs. And also, when we get more revenue into the book, that will also help to raise the EBITDA margin. So we are confident to improve our EBITDA margin going forward in Q4 and in the following quarters. What we look to achieve is looking at, in terms of the guidance, is more towards our Q4 performance. So it's not exactly 50% we've guided. It's closer to 50%. Yeah.
Yes, Pak Nicky.
Thank you for your question.
Pak Nico, I think it's part of our PPT about subscriber base and revenue. But let me reiterate. Customer base is 98.7 million first nine months of 2024 as we speak. And revenue is IDR 42 trillion.
I was referring to fixed broadband, Arthur. Sorry.
Fixed broadband, around 350,000.
Okay. Okay. All right. Do you see problems with this RT/RW issue? Is it very alarming? How we should factor it?
Yeah. As I say, if you are operating into any ecosystem, there are any threats and opportunities. We have to make sure that we are living with that. So we are trying to learn how to live with it and make our strategy based on how we see this as an opportunity. So of course, if there are some threats, we have to find opportunity. So we are thinking to find this as an opportunity. And we'll continue to sharpen our go-to-market in a way that we are actually mitigating the risk of that. But yes, it is impacting.
Just to add, Panicko, our home broadband strategy is more built around more premium service. We don't want to play on a $10, $12, or $100,000 ARPU customer. We are training our data in our GPU farm to target the right location, right building. And then we are looking at more of a bit what you call it as a premium service. So that is where we want to position ourselves.
I see. I see. Maybe if I can ask an additional two more questions, Parither. You mentioned earlier there's now another 2,000 new service points. Is it? This took place in the third quarter, or is it in the last nine months? And you think it's going to grow further, this number?
In rolling this out for the last one year or so, we started this strategy rolling out from September 2023, and we have reached to this number 2,000, but to answer you, yes, we'll continue to grow on this number as well.
Yeah, and maybe one last question to.
Yeah.
Yeah?
Yeah. Silakan Pak .
Yeah. There has been some media news talking about the potential divestment of your fiber cables. I think that was last year. It was mentioned in Bloomberg. Now I think it's back again. Maybe you can give us a bit more information if there is a specific timeline and what kind of gain we should be looking at. Thank you.
Yeah. Hi, Nico. This is Vikram. As I said earlier, we are in the process of carving out our fiber asset. So we have seen extremely good interest on this. But we plan to complete it first half of next year. This is the timeline. And in terms of the next step, I think we will have to wait a little longer for the process to get completed in terms of what kind of gain and all those things. But what I can tell you is the interest level is very high. And then this strategic transaction, which we are doing, will also help us grow our FTTH business.
Got it. Got it. All the best, yeah, going forward. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Piyush Choudhary from HSBC. Please go ahead, Piyush.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks a lot. Just one follow-up on Arthur's question regarding GPU as a service. So the initial kind of GPUs have all been contracted out. What's your kind of strategy over here on ordering or committing to purchase more GPUs? Secondly, could you also tell us how is the margin outlook for this business given now you have signed contracts? What's the EBIT margin of this business?
Hi, Piyush. This is Nicky. Still, for this business, it's still in the early days. So the numbers that Pak Ritesh mentioned earlier is just based on the contracts we have signed. But of course, we are looking to there are a lot of discussions still going on, right? And so we will need to, when we get to a larger scale, I think we will be able to provide more detail on the detail outlook. In terms of the EBITDA margin, we are getting a very high EBITDA margin on this business because the investment really is on GPU hardware, right? And so the EBITDA margin, like what Vikram mentioned earlier, would flow through to NPAT. We are still in the post, a lot of testing and discussion with customers. So there will be chances for us to order more GPU.
But we haven't utilized all the GPU orders that have gone live. We still have capacity to sell more of these services. And depending on the progress, right, of course, we will be in a position to order more GPU and expand the business.
Yeah. So Piyush, just to add to what Nicky said, in November, we have our Indonesia AI Day. Because we were one of the first to go live in the region for H100. We have demonstrated good capabilities on our data center readiness. Our data center partner is BDx So we are working very closely with NVIDIA, and we are getting a lot of support from them. And our ambition is to be one of the first on GB200 also. So you will get to hear more in the coming months.
Excellent. Thanks, Vikram and Nicky. Just Nicky, as you mentioned that it's a CAPEX-heavy business, right? So that's why I was asking, what is the EBIT margin profile? Any color over there? Or you would like the business to scale first to talk about steady-state EBIT margin?
Yes. Yes. I think it would be more useful when we build a larger scale, and then, based on the contracts we have gathered at that time, it would be more meaningful to discuss those numbers. Because there's a lot of distortion based on the cost we have invested, not all the capacity has been leased out.
Yeah. Yeah. Got utilization below right now. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions. I'll now turn the conference back to Parithan for closing comments.
Okay. Thank you, Amber. Thanks, everyone, for joining us on the call today. If you have any questions, please reach out. Otherwise, we will speak to you next quarter. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now.