Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Telkom SA SOC Limited Interim Results Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions later during the conference. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal for an operator by pressing star then zero. Please note that this call is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Sipho Maseko. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much, Claudia. Thanks and welcome to everybody. Good morning to those in the U.S. and then good afternoon to everybody else. From the Telkom team, I am with a couple of my colleagues. I have Serame Taukobong, who is our CEO Designate. I also have our Group CFO, Dirk Reyneke, our head of investor relations and her team, Babalwa George. I'd like to start by unpacking our interim results performance as follows. I will start by unpacking the business performance we witnessed in the first half. Then Serame will spend time on Telkom Consumer performance and share the outlook of this business. Dirk will then unpack the group financial performance, and then I'll come back and conclude with progress in the separate listing of Swiftnet.
Just to say that maybe at a sort of headline level, it's been a very, very difficult and tough first half of the year. We delivered very solid operational performance, and I'll start with the Infraco side of the business, then move to the sort of retail or ISP businesses. I'll start with Openserve, and maybe the headline to take away from Openserve is that the business is really starting to stabilize following a period of decline to the legacy business. The revenue was slightly down in the period by about 1.8% on a year-on-year basis, driven by the demand for mobile backhaul, which increased by about 13% in our carrier data circuits. Total revenue compares favorably to the 8.5% decline reported in the prior year.
Our enterprise business circuits marginally declined by about 1%, impacted by the lingering COVID impact on corporate and small and medium businesses. Despite the revenue being under pressure, EBITDA increased by about 11.2%, with the margin expanding by about 3.7 basis points. Our investment in our network enabled us to carry a 12% increase in fixed broadband traffic to about 809 petabytes. 73% of our fixed-line broadband customers are using more than 10 Mbps and higher, supporting higher data consumption. For the first time in our history of Openserve, we now have 60% of our fixed line broadband customers on next generation technologies, attesting to a very successful strategy to migrate customers from legacy to new generation. In the past, we had tweaked our FTTH strategy to improve our returns.
With the highest connectivity rate in the market, we have started to further accelerate fiber rollout. We are now focusing on expanding our FTTH footprint while we simultaneously focusing on connecting premises to make sure that we maintain a higher connectivity rate. To this end, we increased the number of homes passed with fiber by 54% to 700,000, and the number of homes connected with fiber by 34% to 332,000, representing a connectivity rate of about 47%. I'll now move on to Swiftnet, our mast and tower business. The headline there would be, I think, that the business continues to commercialize its portfolio.
Revenue grew by about 73%, 7.3% rather, to ZAR 674 million, which was underpinned by increasing tenancy in our current productive portfolio and our build program on the tower side. EBITDA grew by about 10% to ZAR 532 million, with the margin expanding by two percentage points to about 79%, underpinned by more efficiencies. As we've indicated to the market in the past, we're preparing this tower business for listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and we are on track to conclude this by the Q4 of our financial year. This I'll touch on a bit later on. BCX remains immensely under pressure, that would be the sort of headline.
Revenue for the period declined by about 6% to ZAR 7.4 billion, mainly impacted by the IT segment, which continues to be under pressure, while the converged communication business is now starting to stabilize. Despite cost management, of which we still expect more from this team, this resulted in data expenses declining by about 13% and OpEx declining by about 4%. EBITDA declined by about 7.7%, rather, compared to the year before, as the savings that were being generated were not enough to offset the declines in revenue.
The converged comms revenue declined by 4.2% to ZAR 3.5 billion, primarily owing to declines in data consumption as employees continue to work from home, hardware delivery backlogs as a result of the global chipset shortage. However, performance was a bit cushioned by the tapering decline in fixed voice. Impressively, 63% of data access revenue in next-generation revenue that we saw. As indicated at the beginning, the IT business revenue is really under pressure, declining by 7.9% to end the period at about ZAR 3.8 billion, largely due to delayed projects. I mentioned the issue of supply chain disruptions and the shortage of chipsets and some of the uncertainties related to the violence we saw in KZN and Gauteng. I'll now hand over to Serame to take us through the consumer performance.
Thank you, Sipho. A solid performance from mobile against the backdrop of a strong performance in the prior year. Despite the rather heightened competitive market activity, we saw our base grow by 18.8% to 16.3 million customers, with a blended ARPU of ZAR 92. The biggest driver of this growth was the prepaid base, which grew by 23.6% to 13.7 million subscribers and an ARPU of ZAR 67. In light of the challenging macro environment, our post-paid base has held steady at an ARPU of ZAR 217. The mobile business delivered a service revenue growth of 6.8% to ZAR 8.8 billion, while the mobile EBITDA exceeded the ZAR 3 billion mark with an EBITDA margin of 29%, in line with management expectations.
The prior year was marked with very high data demand. We managed to hold this data demand, which was maintained at the levels of same as last year at 480 petabytes, but more positively managed to increase our data revenue by 6.1% to ZAR 6.4 billion. Our broadband base increased by 10.3% to 10.6 million subscribers, of which 9.1 million are what we call smart users. We continue to grow the mobile footprint, increasing it by 12.2% to 6,910 sites, where our 4G sites increased by 42.4%. Importantly, most of these sites are within the range of 70%-80% of fiber backhaul, which allows us to effect quick backhaul upgrades in light of customer demands.
Going forward, we will continue to invest in our network and also using roaming agreements to supplement our network footprint, allowing customers to effectively have access to three networks. Telkom has entered into a roaming agreement with MTN South Africa. MTN South Africa will be Telkom's second roaming partner, effective from the first of November 2021. The roaming agreement covers 2G, 3G, and 4G, which will also include seamless handover between MTN and Telkom towers. Telkom also has a roaming agreement with Vodacom. This innovation will allow us then to, one, deliver our customers better experience, two, increase our footprint, and three, most importantly, manage our roaming spend in support of our efforts to drive the EBITDA margin positively going forward. Thank you.
Thank you, Serame.
Sorry, I'll hand over to Dirk now.
Oh, okay. Cool.
Thanks, Serame, and good morning, colleagues. I think let's unpack the financial messages. Despite the tough trading and economic environment, we completed the first half of the year with strong earnings. Earnings performance underpinned by, first of all, sustained group revenue with a marginal decline of 0.5% to just over ZAR 21 billion. Improved profitability with group EBITDA growth of 1.2% and EBITDA margin expansion of 5.5 percentage points. Robust earnings growth. Headline earnings grew by 30.4% year-on-year, driven by an increase in group EBITDA and a significant reduction in finance charges, Forex losses, and fair value movements. We saw accelerated capital investment contributing to a negative free cash flow of ZAR 800 million, and then stable net debt to EBITDA ratio at 1.1 times.
The marginal increase in the debt to EBITDA ratio over our 1x guidance, largely because of the lower cash balances and additional IFRS 16 leases. If we then look at sustained revenue, our group revenue was sustained at ZAR 21.3 billion, with our mobile stream continuing to be the driver of growth. Mobile revenue increased by 9.7% despite experiencing the COVID-19 bump in the prior year that we're comparing with. The performance was offset by the IT business, which remains under pressure due to the challenging trading environment exacerbated by the global supply chain constraints. It's however pleasing to note that while we continue to see a decline in fixed voice and fixed data, as customers continue to migrate to next-generation technologies, this rate of decline has significantly decreased.
Fixed voice decline in the prior period was 29.5% and fixed data 9.5%, and that has moved down to 14.9% and 5% respectively in the current period. We further continue to commercialize our current mast and towers portfolio. With a growth of 5.1% in revenues to ZAR 374 million, and this was underpinned by improving the productive tenancy ratio to 1.55 times. Our improved profitability, group EBITDA increased 1.2% to ZAR 6 billion, with the EBITDA margin expanding by 0.5 percentage points to 28.1%. This was underpinned by 3.1% year-on-year decline in OpEx cost, despite an average salary increase of 6% across the board in the period.
The reduction in OpEx cost and optimization of our cost to serve resulted in a reduction in our total cost to revenue ratio, which reduced by 0.6 percentage points to 73.2%. We continue to optimize our mobile direct expenses. With the easing of the national lockdown, we have seen a 33.8% increase in mobile handsets, which has resulted in 2.5% increase in direct costs. However, our mobile cost efficiency ratios are continuing to improve. The ratios have continued to improve, demonstrating efficient growth in the mobile stream. This was enabled by optimized roaming cost, as we maintain stringent roaming traffic thresholds and migrate traffic to our network supported by the ongoing investment in our network. I've referred to the robust earnings growth.
We've seen a strong earnings growth with basic earnings per share increasing by 27.3% to ZAR 2.768, while headline earnings per share increased by 50.4% to ZAR 2.855 compared to the prior period. This was mainly due to a significant decline in finance charges, fair value movements, and foreign exchange losses compared to the prior financial period. Accelerated capital investment. We continue to invest in our key growth areas, which are fiber and mobile, with a capital investment increase of 22.7% to ZAR 3.6 billion, representing a CapEx to revenue ratio of 17%. With the highest fiber to the home connectivity rate in the market, we've accelerated our fiber rollout.
Fiber services now make up 45% of the total CapEx executed compared to 35% in H1 financial year 2020 and 32% in the prior period. Homes passed increased by 54.2% year-on-year in line with our strategy to increase our market share in fiber. Going forward, we will now focus on expanding the footprint while simultaneously connecting premises to ensure that we maintain the high connectivity rate, and we're targeting to get the 47% connectivity rate back up to above 50. Free cash flow was negatively impacted by a significant increase in CapEx. Cash generated from operations decreased from the comparable period by 9%, largely due to changes in working capital and staff incentive payments relating to the prior year. Some of the key items impacting our cash performance are as follows.
Finance charges paid have declined, lastly, largely because of the debt repayment of ZAR 1.1 billion in the prior period and a further ZAR 100 million in the current period. Tax paid has declined significantly year-on-year, largely due to once-off payments of ZAR 1.2 billion relating to prior year outstanding liabilities. Free cash flow in the current period includes approximately ZAR 300 million of handsets receivables. The biggest contributor was the CapEx paid that increased by ZAR 1.1 billion, largely due to the payment for CapEx executed in the Q4 of full year 2021. All of the above then resulted in the free cash flow after CapEx payment was a negative ZAR 839 million compared to a positive ZAR 211 million in the prior period. If you look at the balance sheet, our balance sheet's stable.
Our solid underlying performance and our conservative funding approach enabled us to strengthen our balance sheet by repaying maturing debt of approximately ZAR 1.1 billion in the prior period. In the period under review, we continued to reduce our debt in line with our debt maturity profile. We've got adequate balance sheet capacity to fund our strategy with our net debt to EBITDA stable at 1.1 times. We target to maintain our annual debt redemptions at or below ZAR 2 billion per annum to manage the refinancing profile and thus reduce refinancing risks. Our interest rate, currently the floating rate debt versus fixed rate debt is 52%-48% ratio. This marginal change in the fixed versus floating was largely because of the repayment of maturing debt.
The higher floating rate, however, has enabled us to benefit from the low interest rate climate, thus reducing finance charges. I think in conclusion, given the challenges of the first half, management will focus on the following for the second half. We target to grow our revenue streams ahead of half one performance, resulting in total year-on-year growth in revenue. This is largely in the areas of fulfilling of IT back orders, driving the connections of homes that we have now passed in half one, and aggressively driving our mobile customer value management initiatives and implementing our mobile regionalization and township growth strategies. We will continue our relentless efforts to contain costs below inflation, and the addition of the MTN South Africa as a second national roaming provider with effect first of November, will assist in optimizing our roaming spend further.
We remain confident that the free cash flow will normalize in the second half of the year, and we'll be able to achieve a positive free cash flow for the year. Returning cash to shareholders remains a key element of our capital allocation framework. Management and the board remains committed to reinstate the dividend policy by the end of the current financial year. Given the advanced stage of the separate listing of Swiftnet, which is expected to be concluded by the end of the financial year, as well as the management transition, Telkom will be in a better place to take a holistic view then of the total capital allocation framework and make an announcement on the dividend policy at the end of the financial year. The board will then deliberate on the dividend declaration at that stage.
The proceeds of the value unlock are expected to be used to either rebase the balance sheet and/or reinvest in the business and/or for shareholder rewards. I will, at this stage, conclude there and hand back to Serame to talk to us about growth and the value unlock strategy. Thanks, Serame.
Thank you. Thank you, Dirk. In terms of business portfolio and the focus on growth, as the growth of mobile continues and fixed line is starting to stabilize following periods of decline subsequent to execution of a migration strategy, management will now focus on our IT business, which has been under pressure due to various reasons. To this end, we are considering investigating a strategic intervention in the business, which will include, but not be limited to the introduction of a strategic partnership in the business. This is aimed at addressing capabilities in BCX and to restore sustainable growth. In terms of the value unlock strategy, which Sipho and Dirk alluded to, we remain committed to the value unlock strategy, which is premised on Telkom's market capitalization not representing its intrinsic value.
Telkom has different classes of infrastructure assets such as data centers, a wholesale network business, and mast and tower businesses, which are globally valued at higher multiples for separate individual businesses than telecommunications. Telkom has made progress in consolidating the data centers in Gyro, with the intention of building a carrier-neutral data center infrastructure business while nearing completion of the legal separation of Openserve. Significant progress has been made in respect of a separate listing in our mast and towers business, Swiftnet, including but not limited to formal engagement with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The listing is expected to be concluded before the end of the financial year, subject to market conditions. Management believes that separating listing of Swiftnet will affirm the valuation of the masts and towers business and its contributions overall to the valuation of Telkom. This concludes the formal part of the presentation.
I'll hand over to Sipho for concluding remarks and for Q&As. Thank you.
Sure. Thanks, Serame. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that's the brief highlights with regards to our performance. I think as indicated earlier on, very, very tough trading environment in the first six months, but the business is stable. We've seen quite a lot of pressure on the IT side, competitive pressure in the economy that is not bouncing back. We have a resilient business, a resilient team that has shown great fortitude. Lots of plans in place that will make sure that the performance in the second half improves and offsets some of the bumps that we had in the first half. Fairly confident of that, but we just need to see it through in detail over the next couple of months.
Maybe back to you, Claudia. We can take a couple of questions. We probably will have about 30 minutes or so to take questions from the participants on the call.
Okay. Thank you very much, sir. If you would like to ask a question, please press star then one on your touchtone phone or in the keypad on your screen. If you decide to withdraw the question, please press star then two to remove yourself from the list. Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then one. The first question comes from Jonathan Kennedy-Good. Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah. Hi, Jonathan.
Hi, hi there, guys, and thanks for the opportunity again. Just wanted to check with you on medium-term guidance. I didn't seem to pick that up in the release. Is that mainly because of the corporate activity that's ongoing with SwiftNet? Or can you give us a steer on, you know, for example, CapEx? I see mobile CapEx, again, quite low in the first half, relative to what the full year number was last year. Just trying to understand what, for example, CapEx will do this year, and any commentary on the medium-term guidance would be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah, Jonathan, Dirk here. The guidance that we've given at year-end was three-year guidance. First of all, very dangerous to look at that at a point in time and compare with that. We've considered that, and we decided it's probably premature to change the three-year guidance. I think, and you're right. There's a combination of things. I think there's still the uncertainty around the spectrum. We didn't, at the time, expect wave three and the riots in Natal. All those things have affected our three-year guidance on the short term. Therefore, we decided we're not gonna change it because it's still early days in the three years.
In your direct question, in terms of short- to medium-term guidance, I think, if you look at CapEx specifically, the level of spend that we've had in the first half, in round numbers ZAR 3.6 billion. I think that's now more evenly spread over the year. You're probably looking at ZAR 7-ZAR 7.2, ZAR 7.3-ish billion for the full year, not the 8+ that's previously been guided. On the short to medium term, we're probably back at ZAR 7-ZAR 7.3 billion. And then certainly in cash flow, we were previously talking about ZAR 2 billion. I said at the last quarter that ZAR 2 billion will be a stretch and under pressure. We're very confident we'll be back in positive free cash flow territory for the full year.
There's significant one-offs in half one that won't be in half two. Probably closer to 1-1.5 than the 2 that we said before. I think in terms of EBITDA and revenue growth, it's early days to change that guidance.
Great. Thank you. That's very helpful.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just another reminder.
Mm-hmm.
We will pause to see if there are any other questions. The next question comes from Vikhyat Sharma from RMB Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the opportunity. I think you guys have mentioned this new strategic partnership in the IT business, and some I think Sipho kind of indicated consolidation there as well. I wanted to know, and I think is it more kind of, you know, just normal partnering with, you know, companies that have probably got better distribution or some of those cloud partners? Or is it something, you know, you are looking to invest in terms of equity or somebody else is looking to kind of get an equity partnership into IT business? In consolidation, I mean, I think are you looking for, you know, kind of consolidating within the industry at some niche businesses?
Yeah. I mean, I think slightly more invasive than the first point that you made, you mentioned. We're looking to embed a lot more capability into BCX, especially on the IT side, so that we can become a lot more competitive, and be able to leverage the economies of skill and scale that those strategic equity partners would bring. Maybe if I just give you a bit of an example. We have a cyber security team. They've been incredibly busy dealing with a lot of cyber incidents. But the cyber incidents far outnumber the capacity for them to be able to do a lot more of those. We are not spending enough time in terms of the R&D side of cyber.
Actually, if you partner with a global scale player, you can then be able to lean a lot more into their capabilities to, in a sense, shorten the cycles of development and enhancing your capabilities and supporting your mega clients. BCX supports the large banks, almost all of them, the large retailers, almost all of them, the pharmaceutical chains and so forth. So it's very, very important, therefore, that they themselves are able to lean into back into the capability of a strategic equity partner who'd help their clients to remain or become best in class relative to their peers around the world. So that's kinda how we are thinking about it. As the meta progresses, we'll certainly have a way of keeping everybody connected and informed appropriately. Thank you.
Vikhyat, does that answer all of your questions? Do you have any further questions?
No, thanks.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just one final call. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star then one. We will pause to see if there are any further questions.
Jonathan, you don't wanna ask another question?
We actually have a follow-up from Jonathan Kennedy-Good. Please go ahead, Jonathan.
How did I know, Jonathan?
Sorry. I thought I'd take a chance given that no one else is asking. Could you just walk us through the kind of operational separation that you speak about in Openserve and where we are in the process there in terms of a potential value unlock? Just some color would be helpful.
Sipho, you wanna talk about it?
Jonathan, Dirk again. Let me talk about it. I think it's an ongoing process, and you'll say, I say that to you every three months. I think it's fair to say that we are managing that process, and we're fully in control of the cadence and the timing. There are some big strategic decisions that would affect, or the consequences of that would have impact on the rest of the group, and we're busy unpacking those, and I'm specifically talking things like real estate, IT outsourcing, you know, transfer pricing, those sort of things that we do need to get right. In terms of balance sheet split, it's done. Bottoms up. Sorry, top-down, we are now saying how does that compare with the bottoms up.
In terms of valuation based on that split, that's completed, so we've got a fair idea of an indicative valuation. Yeah, so I'm not gonna commit to timelines. Fair to say that we've got a full SteerCo that consists of five of the Exco members and advisors, external and internal. We've probably got very close to some final proposals and suggestions that we will take to the SteerCo still in the current month, and then we'll take it from there. I think we will communicate back to the market with more detail as and when appropriate.
Great. Thank you. That's helpful. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. The next question comes from Nadim Mohamed from SBG Securities. Please go ahead, Nadim.
Good afternoon, everyone. Just one question from my side. Just like some color on the growth you're seeing in prepaid subscribers. I mean, it does seem quite substantial at about 24%, year-on-year, but not quite filtering through to your revenue growth. I'd just like to get a sense, are they lower value customers or offerings? What exactly is going on on the ground there?
Thank you, Nadim. I think the prepaid must be looked in 2 ways. We've got to take out the bump that we saw last year, which took the prepaid ARPU above 80. The prepaid ARPU is back to the pre-COVID levels at the 60s. I think the range that management tracks is between 65 and 70. The focus has also been on ensuring that we drive quality of acquisition as opposed to quantity. I think that's reflected by the fact that, you know, you're not seeing the high 30s, high 40s% growth, but I think stabilizing at your 20s-odd. We've also changed our dealer contracts to reward them more on tenure, and equally pushing quite aggressively in the back end to drive our CVM and retention initiatives.
I think there's a lot of work being done to make sure that ARPU stabilizes, kinda ZAR 65-ZAR 70, and we're happy with the progress we've seen with that so far.
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Rajat Suri from Helm. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Sorry for the background noise, but two questions from me. One, Dirk, can you just confirm you expect free cash flow for the year to be ZAR 1 billion-ZAR 1.5 billion, and the first half was down ZAR 800 million. That's quite a swing. Maybe you could just talk us through the different moving parts. And I guess related to that is, at least I was expecting some color on dividend policy on these results. And it sounds like you delayed them, which is fair enough, but maybe you could just talk through what are the puts and takes that you expect to happen over the next four or five months, that'll give you more clarity on what the dividend policy should look like going forward.
Rajat, thanks for that. I think if you look at, let's unpack the 800 negative free cash flow for the first half. First of all, there's some big numbers in there. If you take the positives that goes contra the negative, it's really the tax, the reduction in tax, which is ZAR 400 million, which were in the prior year relating to the old tax issues and queries. Secondly, there's a ZAR 300 million device sale in. That's the positive. That's a ZAR 700 million positive in half one. Having said that, we will do further device sales to probably similar levels in half two. Take that as a ZAR 700 million positive. If you look at the negatives that's in there.
First of all, you will note the CapEx increase, the repayment on CapEx, and I alluded to that at year-end and at quarter results, that we had an acceleration of CapEx in the Q4 and Q3 of the prior year. With our 90-day payment terms, that cash was only paid out in the current year. That's in excess of ZAR 1 billion. It's close to ZAR 1.1 billion. Furthermore, you will note that in terms of working capital investment, there's a ZAR 1.1 billion in there. We see some of that reversing and actually becoming positive as we take out the cyclical nature of the inventory purchases and we recover some of the big debtors that's currently in arrears. We do some of that reversing.
Lastly, we had a big number, probably under ZAR 1 billion, but it's a large number relating to staff incentives that was paid out in H1 that will not be paid out in H2 again. That relates to your accrual for your prior year-end. If you just look at the ones within the 800, it's probably ZAR 2.3 billion, ZAR 2.4 billion of cash outflows that will not happen in the second half of the year. If you normalize for that, you will probably be able to calculate where I get to my number. I think in terms of the dividend, as I said, the board remains committed to reinstate the dividend policy by the end of the current financial year.
I realize that there's some expectation that we would have done it now, but we believe that with the advanced stage of the separate listing of Swiftnet, which is expected to be concluded by year-end, with a stabilization of all the management transitions, hopefully some more certainty around spectrum by year-end. I think those are probably, yeah, and fourthly, COVID, wave four or not. You know, I think those are the four major uncertainties currently that we're saying, well, by year-end, we should be in a better position to take a more holistic view and take that into account in the formulation of the new dividend policy and the rollout of the dividend policy.
I just want to again reiterate that in terms of value unlock impact on the, on dividend policy, I think we've been clear all along that one mustn't assume that the value unlock will automatically result in a dividend or a special dividend for that matter. The value unlock, as I said, that money we reserve for reinvesting in the business and/or rebase the balance sheet if required, and/or return cash to the shareholders, or a combination of all three of them. That's really the dividend story, Rajat. Hope that helps.
Yeah. Thank you very much. That's very helpful on the cash flow side, at least.
Rajat, do you have any further questions or is that it?
I guess if I can ask the team, you know, another African tower company listed not so long ago, a little bit disappointing, you know, priced at the low end of the range, stocks traded weak. You know, how has that, I'm sure it's something you've been watching closely. How has that sort of altered, in any way, your thinking around Swiftnet and the potential value unlock or the value crystallization that comes from that listing?
Can I get that?
Yeah, no, I mean, we've seen it. It has not tempered our views at all. We've stress tested our valuation, even with the early look that we've been conducting in the last couple of weeks. We comfortable that where we would want to pitch, it'll be at the right point that accords to the market funding that we have done before. We are reasonably okay. You're right, we've kinda watched it, but we pitching it in a different way. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is a follow-up question from Vikhyat Sharma from RMB Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. I think my question is to Serame. I think, from the results presentation where you mentioned, you know, the competitors obviously took the pricing down and Telkom is more aligning to that pricing, and kind of Telkom has responded. I think your competitors have indicated that, you know, there is a lot more pressure at the bottom end of the, you know, subscriber base. I mean, after the response that you have done and after the alignment of pricing, if I may say so, I mean, is the competitive intensity kind of settling down, stabilizing, let's call it post, the six months? Or is there still a very competitive environment because, the lower end is under pressure?
I think the shape of the environment has changed since we last spoke. I think at the lower end, we remain quite competitive. We're quite happy with the approach that we've taken of not necessarily dropping price, but giving more value. Where we have seen more aggressive activity is on the higher side, so a lot of bigger packages. We've also responded in that regard. Our summer campaign launched on the first of October, and the price points that we've come to are quite aggressive and competitive. So we believe that we have a very fair and balanced proposition, both for the low end and for the high end.
I'd love to add further to that. We also have seen very positive growth in our fiber attempts, especially from a retail perspective. The pricing there is quite competitive, and not just the balance of price, but also speeds. As we sit today, quite happy to announce that at least over 70% of our customers on fiber are on speeds that are higher than 10 Mbps. Equally, we have, I think reached the inflection point where the homes passed, the homes connected on fiber actually are higher than traditional copper. I think we've got a nice mix in the telecom stable of good LTE pricing, but equally quite affordable and aggressive fiber. We've also just recently announced the launch of our prepaid fiber offering as well.
I think from a broadband perspective, we've got all the tools we need to make sure that we continue to focus our ambition on driving broadband growth.
Yeah. I suppose, I mean, just to build on what Sirame's saying. The bundles are becoming bigger, fixed and mobile.
Clearly those with the right proposition on the fixed side, in terms of entry-level speeds and pricing will fare better. Obviously, on the spectrum side, the capacity issues will be very important. I think with the roaming agreement, the mobile team have been able to deal with the coverage issues, and the big issue now will be who then has the right amount of capacity or lungs to be able to bring about the right sort of value proposition on the data side, to complement what we are doing on the fixed side. I think it's gonna be a lot of fun going forward, in this sector in terms of the interplay between fixed and wireless and the relative entry-level points, both from a bundle sizes and pricing, going forward.
Yeah. Thanks, Sipho Maseko.
Thank you. Mr. Maseko, we have no further questions in the queue. Can I hand back to you for closing remarks?
Sure. No, thank you very much, Claudia. Thanks very much, everybody for joining. I think I've indicated, I mean, personally, it's been a, yeah, probably one of the most difficult periods in the main, right? In the main, not just from a business perspective. I think the environment, COVID, it's been a very, very tough time for a lot of people. So certainly commend the fortitude of the management team just to kinda see it through. I think that it looks a lot more promising. Obviously not gonna be easy on the forward look. Lot still needs to be done, but I think there's a clear plan, at least from where we sit in terms of who needs to do what to bring it home at the end of the year.
I think very confident around that. Thank you, Claudia. Thank you, everybody, and have a good day further or good evening if you are in South Africa. Thank you. Cheers.
Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.