Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this important occasion. Over the past few years, we have undergone a significant transformation under our strategic reset. This journey has allowed us to sharpen our business focus, achieve substantial operational improvements, and successfully execute a capital recycling program, all while placing a strong emphasis on investing in our people and sustainability. However, none of this would have been possible without the valuable feedback we received from our investors. Your insights have been instrumental in shaping our next chapter, Singtel28, a strategy centered on sustained value realization. Through Singtel28, we are committed to lifting business performance, managing capital smartly, and continuing to champion our people and sustainability efforts. Thank you once again for your support and trust in our journey. Now, let me share how I, Digital Human Moon, was created.
First, we fed the slides and prompts into a large language model to generate the script. Then, using a GenAI digital human generator, we fed in a one-minute pre-recorded video of Moon. This powerful tool cloned his voice and created me, the digital human version of Moon. It's a fascinating demonstration of AI technology in action, and with that, let's now welcome the real Moon to continue today's presentation.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome, welcome to Singtel Investor Day. I hope you enjoyed the Digital Moon. Fortunately, I still have a job. I mean, just to show how easy it is, I didn't do anything at all. The slides were prepared by the IR team. They fed it through with the right prompts. The speech came out, and they put it in an engine. They took one of my old videos that I did some time ago, and the only thing I did is really show up with the same shirt so that it looks the same color. That's all. I mean, you can imagine the power of AI and how fast it's going to change the way we operate and the way we work. And this is just the tip of the iceberg because I'm just doing a presentation.
In every aspect of our business will be transformed if you adopt AI, and this is something that almost every company is adopting, and I can assure you, you know, all the CEOs, we had a workshop yesterday. In fact, everyone is saying, "Yes, we are doing something. We are improving on our operations. We are lifting performance." And this will be shown and seen in the operating performance of many OpCos as they look at cost optimization, as they look at how they're gonna improve their operating margins and profits. Let me start by just talking through the results since we announced our Singtel28 transformation. We talked about what is Singtel28, which is really lifting the operating performance of our operating companies and the smart use of capital to recycle, relocate, and reinvest in growth business.
And the result of that is really to generate sustainable value realization, and we have committed to providing returns to our investors and our shareholders. And since that announcement in May, we have seen that the share price have actually responded, and the market have responded. That means our story is consistent, and everybody is supporting this plan, and we've grown 22%. This is as of yesterday's share price. We believe that this is going to be sustained and will continue. At the current rate, I think we are still gonna get, based on last dividend that we paid out, is about 5.5%-6% yield, depending on how the share price move.
And we believe this can be sustained over the next few years as we continue to lift our business performance and we continue to recycle capital. We announced our Q1 results just probably a week and a half ago, and as you can see, the underlying performance on our EBITDA and EBIT is actually primarily driven from the improvement in performance from Optus and from NCS. Right? But there was some concern that revenue is not growing. I'll share a bit more about the quality of the business, the quality of the revenue, later on in the next slide. But as you can see, the improvement is actually quite consistent across all the opcos.
And of course, unfortunately, we are also impacted by foreign currency movements, which actually hit us quite badly because the Sing dollar continued to appreciate quite strongly. And if you look at our cash balance and our debt profile, our net debt to EBITDA continue to be very healthy, as we continue to recycle our assets and balancing investment and for growth. So overall, if you look at it, it is a very robust set of Q1 numbers, and we believe the momentum is behind us, and this will carry through to our H1 results. So let me double-click onto the revenue because there was some concern that the revenue is not growing.
If you look at just the Q1 numbers last year, the revenue, our traditional core revenue is actually in the red color bit, is actually have turned the corner and started to grow by 1% but the reported numbers still reported a decline. It's really because of some of the one-off revenues and some of the old Trustwave revenue that we have divested the company, and we no longer consolidate. But that revenue is actually on a negative margin, and actually selling the company help us lift the underlying profit. The blue color part is really a one-off satellite revenue that is coming from both Australia satellite business and Singapore satellite business.
As we prepare to launch new satellites in both countries, there's actually project costs, and we work with our clients, and these are the early revenue that we book during the initial preparation stage, and it's one-off in nature until the satellite is launched. So you will see the blue color part actually disappear this quarter from last year's first quarter. So if you remove that, you remove the Trustwave revenue and, of course, some of the currency impact on the A dollar weakness, you see that the core revenue is actually have turned around and started to grow a bit, 1%. Right? So we believe this momentum, again, you know, is driven behind the mobile service revenue growth both in Singapore and Australia. It's also NCS improvement in their growth momentum from Gov+ and Telco+, that's driving this momentum.
And finally, let me hand over the stage to Arthur, who will deep dive into a bit more on our drivers and our ST28, and I'll come back up for Q&A later. Arthur?
Hi, everyone. Thanks, Moon, for the introduction, and very good morning to all of you. Actually, both the real human Moon and the digital human Moon, right? As Moon mentioned, I think the focus today, I think, you know, you will be meeting a lot of our colleagues and really going diving deep into each business. But the focus today, I think the message that both Moon and I want to deliver is, you know, really this whole ST28 strategy and how do we actually get there. I think all of you know the destination, what we want to do, right? SGD 0.03-SGD 0.06 of our VRD, continue to grow our core dividend, our EBIT guidance that we have given.
You know, we have given CapEx guidance as well, you know, our cost structure and all that, but really, what does it actually mean to deliver on ST28 in a few years' time, and you will hear this consistent theme across all the sessions today. I think the first thing is really, you know, in the last three years, right, this strategic reset period, it was really cleaning up, right? It's because we had a lot of the headwinds that we are facing. COVID didn't help. The industry, you know, whole digitalization trends were all against us, and then you had the huge CapEx cycle. There were a few issues happening, more specific to the industry in India, in Australia, and all this actually leaked and in some ways destroyed value, right?
But today, I think all that is behind us with the cleaning up, with the restructuring, with the sale of loss-making businesses, and really leveraging on this new model of capital recycling that we have. Now, looking forward, right, what does it mean, right? The first one is really driving the top-line growth. I think we've talked a lot about in the past, right, getting rid of revenues that don't generate any profits, right? Now, looking forward, we've got to drive revenues, and what do I mean? Today, you will hear, right, my colleagues talking about what kind of revenues can we generate based on today the strengths that we have, right? The 5G network that we have spent money and built on. The data center capacity, which in the past nobody quite knew we are one of the largest data center players in Singapore.
For people who know, one megawatt of capacity here in Singapore is worth a few X higher than anywhere in the region, right? I think the other point that you'll hear is also for NCS, the customer relationships it has, the margins and the work that it's doing. All this gives us opportunity to generate revenue that drives the margin. Okay, this is high-quality revenue. We will talk more about that. Leaner cost structure, right? With the cleaning up, the restructuring of the groups, enterprise, consumer in Singapore coming together, in Australia, enterprise and consumer coming together, there are massive synergies. We have announced some cost outs, and gave some guidance. We are definitely on track, and we will look to continue to bring our cost structure down, and that, of course, helps margin. The third one is our regional associates.
You will meet all of them today, right? All four of them. I think all this, there are some very fundamental trends that are supporting the industry, right? The move into fixed, every single one is putting into fixed- I mean, putting capital into fixed, either through inorganic acquisitions or organic growth. There's... Because of industry structure, I think market repair has come back in many of the countries, and you will see a nice uplift, and actually you have seen it in the past few quarters already, and you will continue to see that, and then finally, proactive capital management is key. Capital management to us is, one, CapEx, right? First of all, be more disciplined in CapEx. Moon keeps reminding all of us, right? It's not just about what you want to spend on, but it's about what you can afford, right?
I think in addition to that, it's really leveraging on private capital, leveraging on capital that's basically locked up or latent value in our assets, and kind of allocating that into our growth investments, where, to be frank, certain pockets of the growth areas that we want to focus on, maybe private capital will be able to resolve that better than public capital. So these are some of the strategies that we are adopting to deliver on ST 28. This is a quick ten-minute overview. My colleagues today, throughout the day, will cover these points. But I want to talk about Singtel and Optus first. These are our core business. This is really fundamentally driving the majority of our cash flows.
Now, when we talk about ST28, revenue growth, leaner cost structure, it is really driving EBITDA, EBIT, free cash flows, right? It is these three that will generate the dividends, the yield, and as well as the growth that we are seeing. ROIC is also important, especially for capital-intensive businesses, but it's not just the absolute ROIC, it is actually the growth or the, hopefully, the increase in ROIC that we are aiming for, right? So if you look at Singtel today, right. You will hear today Tian Chong and Anna sharing, and Bill Chang sharing the enterprise expansion is really doubling down on the enterprise business. Singapore today, Singtel, is really the largest in terms of market share. We have a very credible list of customers, grade A sterling customers.
We have a 5G network, and Singapore has a standalone network, which means that we can slice up this network, we can monetize some of these investments that we have spent money on. In the past, we always say 5G, very difficult to make money, but there are new use cases that we are using. Example, I'm sure at least 30% of this hall has been to the Taylor Swift concert. If you actually have a Singtel network. If you are a Singtel customer, you go into the crowded network. If you want to look like a hero to your teenage daughters or your sons, right, you want to be the first to record Taylor on stage singing, and then upload it straight away on your Instagram account, right?
Now, with thousands of others competing to do the same, if you're on the Singtel network, you buy a 5G slice, you'll be able to upload it a few seconds faster, and you look like a hero because you're the first to upload it, right? You finish the concert, you decided not to drive. You go out, you want to take a Grab. Everybody is on the Grab app, right? There is a lot of delay. But again, if you look at, and something which Tian Chong will share, right, it's if you, if Grab purchases something that is specific to us, there is a special lane of higher speeds that you can access the Grab app. As a customer, you'll be able to get your Grab car faster. These are the use cases that Tian Chong will share about in actually leveraging on what we have today.
It is not new businesses that could potentially go wrong. It is business that we know how to execute on, right? It's IoT, right? You see today, you go out, you see so many BYDs and electric cars and connected cars out there. We will talk about how we are working with the connected car industry on IoT solutions. And then finally, you might have seen a, or you've seen definitely some social media posts about this, about a Fortune 50 company, right? Where in the past, our enterprise business was focused on these MNCs, but primarily in Singapore or the region. Now, they're looking at us as can we develop or can we provide global solutions for that? And that definitely has better revenue potential, better margins, and a more sustainable and stickier business. So this is the new direction that Singtel Singapore is going to focus on.
Optus. Optus has gone through a very difficult few years, especially in the last two years with all the one-off incidents. Hopefully, that's all behind us, right? The focus now, as you know, the company has priced up. We will continue to see this revenue momentum in the mobile business. We will see the focus on SMBs, which is a good segment of the market to focus on, and finally, the enterprise. There's a lot of momentum we are seeing in the enterprise space, with a lot of cleaning up, the rationalization of the product catalog, narrowing down the vendors, changing our incentive structure, focus on profitable revenues and not just any revenues. All that will change, and you will hear Michael, Maurice, and the team talk about it today, about how we're turning around the enterprise business in Australia.
So these are the ways where we can generate revenues, our growth engines, okay? I think Bill will not have a problem sharing with you all the exciting expansion plans that we have, right? And expansion plans, of course, come with capital, but we have, together with our capital partner, KKR, to actually fund this growth together. I mean, you all know we announced this deal actually exactly a year ago, and that has promised to be looking like a very promising capital partnership, and it's actually growing, right? We're funding this growth, and I would say if you look in the near term or in the next few years, EBITDA will double from this space. NCS.
NCS is really focused on greatly generating more revenues from the customer, focusing beyond just our government accounts, going into new markets, and equally important is focus on higher-margin business and not just reselling of infrastructure or products and all that. These are the ways where, again, my colleagues will share about how we improve on revenues. On our costs, right? We talked a lot about core business costs. Last year, we met our targets. This year, we are on track. Next year, we said we have another two hundred. It's basically two hundred for each year in the next, in the last three years. Fiscal year 2024, we've done that. This year, we're on track, and then next year is another two hundred. We'll continue to reduce costs.
With the simpler structure that we have, costs will come down. Corporate cost is something we didn't talk about last time. We have, I think what we have announced in Singapore alone, we have SGD 150 million of corporate costs. We are in the process of reducing 20%. So basically, the colleagues all, whether you're a business head or a corporate head, everyone is really focused on really tightening our belts. Gopal, yesterday in our session, you know, he and I mean, people who have known Airtel, it's not just about cost reduction, it's about waste reduction. And in any large organization, waste reduction, I think, is very relevant and very germane to the discussion. CapEx, I've talked about this ago.
We want to make sure that we leverage on sustainable CapEx, and to really fund growth, growth CapEx through capital partnerships. Now, the other point is our associates, a very, very big part of our business, right, and our performance. I talked about really the market repair that's coming back in many markets, whether it's two players or three players, every market is consolidating, and that's definitely a positive in the mobile industry, right? We will hear more about the growth. You have seen the double-digit growth in some of our markets, and we continue to see a lot of promise there, right? We also have seen new growth areas. Just as in Singapore, we are going into a lot of new revenue opportunities.
I think in, in Telkomsel, in AIS, actually in Bharti and Globe, all of us are really focused on the new next big growth, which is really the fixed broadband, and we have the right to play, right? Today, Telkomsel is not just the number one mobile player, it is the number one fixed and mobile player. Same thing with AIS, with the acquisition of 3BB. So there's tremendous opportunity there in this space. It is, again, growth that is ancillary to our core business, and we have the right to play and execute on it. There's continues to be greater value creation opportunities for us at Singtel with our associates.
I think the one to call out is really the simplification of the holdings that we have in our associates, and you all have probably heard about this massive transaction we are working with, with our partner at Gulf, involved in Intouch and AIS, is to really simplify the structure, right? Where over time, I think we will... It's really part of the value creation and value realization initiatives that we have as part of our ST28. Capital management is very key in our ST28 strategy, right? And that really is essentially the funding of the Value Realization Dividend that we have announced. I think all of us, I'm not gonna spend time, I know you all will be asking a lot of questions, which associates will you sell now? How much of Airtel will you sell down?
We have said what we have said, and we are comfortable with that, right? We have always said publicly we will equalize our stake with Sunil, our partner in India. It doesn't have to be tomorrow. It can be in the next three to five years. We do it in the right way, and the right way to help develop Airtel, right? Airtel, AIS, Telkomsel, Globe, these are long-term strategic holdings that we take. We are not in any hurry to dispose of everything or all the stakes in these companies, right? I mean, no other telco or even a Singapore company can say that we have businesses in regions around the region, right? Where we're number one or number two business, generating high levels of cash flow and profitability. This is something that's unique to Singtel, which we do not intend to change.
We have also said that we have. You drive around Singapore, for people who are familiar with Singapore, you see sometimes a Singtel building with a Singtel logo. All these are properties that we could think about monetizing, right? At the appropriate time. No different than what we did with our own headquarters in Somerset, just, about two MRT stops away, right? I think the other point to call out is out of this SGD 6 billion of asset recycling target that we have in the next few years, it is really leveraging on our partnerships with private capital. We do strongly feel that in capital-intensive businesses like data centers, like telcos, we need to bring in alternate sources of capital.
Only then will we always have the ability and the leverage to grow, because one, sometimes the public capital markets will not appreciate the nature of the asset, and that's where private capital comes in, and of course, at the right valuations, if structured properly, with the right partner, we will do that. No different than what we did with Nxera last year with KKR. We will continue to do this, and we in our pipeline now, we do think we've got about 2-3 billion that we are targeting with capital partners in the medium term, right? And this could be our, you know, growth engines to help us fund the growth capital that we are looking at. So this is really something that you have seen. We are committed to growing this. This fiscal year, we have grown our dividend to a total of SGD 0.15.
We will continue to do that. Some of you do ask: "Are you all doing share buybacks?" We're not saying no, right? We are looking into it. We are open to it. It really, there are a lot of considerations that we need to think about, but whatever it is, I think rest assured, there is a relentless and laser-focused commitment to ensure that we drive shareholder value, and I think we are on the right track, and we have the ability to do so. So if I could take you in the next three to five years, if we are standing here, right, if I still have a job, right? If I'm standing here, right, saying, talking about underlying net profit, right, these are the drivers that will move our underlying net profit from SGD 2.2 billion to X.
Now, internally, we have a number, what X is, of course, we can't share that. But think about these are the areas where we can drive ourselves towards X, right? First two is really our core business. I talked a lot about enterprise expansion in both our two core markets, mobile price up, right, in Australia. Now, an added thing which we don't talk about is if there's industry consolidation in Singapore, there will be an extra bonus to us, but that's something we cannot just factor in. Doubling of Nxera's EBITDA, right? With the pipeline and the visible pipeline that we have, it's a matter of time, unless things completely change in the data center world. NCS margin expansion. Kuo Pin will talk about how he intends to grow that margin.
Of course, our regional associates continue to fire up in the mobile place, in the mobile space, as well as fixed broadband and enterprise, and finally, with all the various cost-out programs. This will take us to X in the next few years, and we do intend to grow. We stand by our guidance of EBIT growing at high single digits to low double digits. Today, very fun, very good, enjoyable day with all our leaders of the whole Singtel group. I encourage you all to really attend every session and ask as many questions as possible. Thank you.
Thank you, Arthur.
Thank you for your patience. We can now start the panel Q&A. Just a note, I have colleagues stationed around the room, so if you have any questions that you wish to ask, do raise your hands, and someone will hand you a mic to ask your questions. Do state your name and your company as you address your question, which will help us better identify you. Do know that this session is being recorded, and we may post it on our website. So we can begin the Q&A. So maybe Piyush from the center of the room.
Piyush from HSBC. Good morning, to the management team, and thanks for the presentation. Two questions. Firstly, on your value realization dividend, you have given a range of SGD 0.03-SGD 0.06. Last year you paid SGD 0.038. What factors influence, you know, this range? Like, if the asset monetization happens in a particular year, would there be more payout, or would the core earnings have an impact? Like, you know, your thoughts on how you are thinking on parameters which will influence. Secondly, could you talk on Australia? Like, you have done mobile price up. Can you give us an update on the TPG network sharing deal and what next you are looking at? What is the medium-term ROIC targets, for Australia business?
Maybe I'll tackle the second question, and Arthur can come back and talk about our VRD and how do we look at it. In fact, but Piyush, you actually, you know, answered the question yourself already. But if you look at Australia, Optus, what we are doing. Later on in the breakout, Michael can answer a bit more in-depth questions. But if we look at how, you know, we are doing in terms of mobile pricing and the network sharing, I think the market definitely needs to generate higher return to sustain the investment in Australia, and this is not unique to Optus. I think this is for the entire Australia, all the three operator needs to actually generate higher return to sustain that high level of investment that is required to cover the whole of Australia.
So far, our regional network sharing arrangement with TPG, I think has been well received. It's still up for consultation, and I believe by middle of September, there will be a decision and ruling, and if that goes through smoothly, I think, you know, we can expect things to run very quickly because we are not waiting. I think there's currently already discussion with TPG in terms of how, which are the sites, where to set up, and how to consolidate. The planning has already started because we are making the assumption that this will go through eventually. With regards to the VRD, I think, you know, there's definitely a lot of consideration. Of course, we have to look at what, where are the new growth initiatives and where the growth investment needs. That will have to come as well.
After removing that and looking at our debt profile, then the assets will be then considered for VRD. I explained quite a fair bit. If you look at the two bookends of 3-6 cents, right? If you take an assumption that you're gonna support this 3-6 cents of VRD for five years, let's say, right? So it's 3 cents times five years, 6 cents times five years, the two bookends. It's gonna cost us about SGD 2.4-4.8 billion, right? 2.4 to 4.8. If I paid 3 cents continuously for five years or 6 cents, but the first year we already said is 3.8. But if you look at Arthur's slide earlier on, the asset recycling, we have SGD 6 billion.
Right
Identified, and then there's another two or three potential partners, fund that we can dip into. So you can see there's more than sufficient, even when we are going for the extreme high end of it, right? So it really depends on the timing, I think. Beyond that, maybe, Arthur, you, any other consideration you may-
I think if I may add on to what Moon said, I think if you look, you know, simply from sources and users, right? For the source, I mean, we've talked about, you know, all the variety of assets that we have, and that could come from, you know, various sources of assets that we have today that if we think that makes sense, we will recycle. And then there's also private capital that we talked about, right? So, like last year, I would count the 1.1 billion coming from KKR as capital that is helping us. And then even Lendlease, for example, as a partner in our property in our HQ. On the users of that cash that we unlock, it's not everything's going to VRD, right?
It's as Moon said, growth, right? If we want to continue to expand our data centers or NCS business, we'll leverage on that source of capital. And also we, you know, well, in the last three years, we paid down debt, but I think our leverage now is at a comfortable position, right? And of course, the other important part is the VRD. That's why we gave a range. Now, how do we think about that, right? It's really driven by basically the return that we have on our current asset versus where the alternate return is, right? Earnings yield right? There are certain earnings yield versus the dividend yield that we pay out. I think these are some of the things that we have to think through as well.
So it's not just, you know, willy-nilly that we just have to meet that SGD 0.03-SGD 0.06 target, but I think we have put enough thought into it and enough plans into the SGD 6 billion number to fund that SGD 2.4 billion-SGD 4.8 billion in the next five years. Yeah.
Thank you. Any other questions from the floor? Maybe right at the back. Ranjan, right?
Hi, good morning, and thank you for this Investor Day. It's Ranjan Sharma from JP Morgan. Two questions from my side. Firstly, Moon, you started with the digital moon and AI. Can you talk about the opportunities for efficiencies that you see with AI for Singtel and the overall group? And the second question is on capital management. Does the management see an opportunity to become more asset light, let's say, with all the data centers that you're building, whether you could monetize the shell and core through a REIT structure or things like that, which allows you to release more capital from non-core assets? Thank you.
Sure. Thanks, Ranjan. I'll take the first question, and then Arthur can talk about the second. But if you look at Gen AI, and there are many studies, and consultants will tell you that if you look at it both from a revenue generation and cost reduction or productivity improvement, it actually cut across all aspect of the business. I think the range everyone is telling us is you may be able to lift your top line by 10%-15% if you're using Gen AI to do more targeted sales and more direct sales and how you train your salespeople. So that is possible if you run it at scale. And, and of course, everything have to be run at scale and not just doing pilots.
And of course, if you look at the cost side, all the way from network costs, IT costs, G&A costs, you know, your general running operating costs or customer service costs, the range of reduction can anywhere be 10%-20% as well. But if you apply that as a principle, then you can really improve your productivity and lift your profits. So that's one aspect of it. Of course, where do you pick to run this GenAI program at scale, and what are the foundations that you need to set up? Your data structure needs to be ready, your IT architecture needs to be set up properly so that you can take advantage of the technology to help you drive improvement in productivity. So we have identified some, and that's why we are not doing this alone.
We have signed up with some of the biggest telcos in the world on the GTAA Alliance to really learn how to build telco LLM models that is applicable for our industry, right? Whether it's just from a call center perspective or from a sales perspective. So these are all being experimented, but we have to deploy at scale in order to harness and harvest the benefits of GenAI. So, I thought that this morning's demonstration is just to show how easy it is just to adopt it, you know, and change the way we operate.
You know, a few hours of job, a few days of job can come out with a solution like that, and you can imagine you would deploy it at scale, the productivity improvement will be significant. So I would say cost-wise, easily 10%-20% if you target at running at scale on a specific operation, and then on top of that, you can have revenue generation as well. Arthur?
On the.
Data center.
the question on the REIT, right?
Yeah.
I think the short answer is in the next two, three years, answer is no, no plans at all, and the reason is it doesn't make sense, right? You know, the yields today in the REIT market is still nowhere conducive to what we can get from the private market. I mean, you all saw you know, the deal that we did. And the other point is, if you look at our portfolio, many of our... a lot of that portfolio is actually under development, which is not suited for a REIT. But I think the question that I also want to address is, you know, all these, you know, exercises that we can do, right? I think the fundamental thing is what makes sense for the Singtel shareholder, right?
This is something that we are driving at, and as long as it brings value, we will consider it. Today, a public REIT does not make sense for our Singtel shareholder, right? And it doesn't make sense for the business as well. Yeah.
Next, oh, okay, in the center. Rohit? Yeah.
Hi, thank you for hosting the Investor Day and answering our questions. Rohit from Fullerton Fund Management. You mentioned that one of the key profit drivers is enterprise expansion in Australia and Singapore markets. If you could give more color, like what are some of the steps you are taking to grow the enterprise business, and whether this new business would be margin-accretive to the margins or diluted to the margins? If you could give more color to that. Thank you.
Sure. Thank you, Rohit. I think, it's a very good question because the focus on enterprise is actually quite, significant because we are riding the wave of enterprises trying to digitalize, trying to go to the cloud, and adopting Gen AI. So there are many, initiatives. I think every company is forced to transform, to, to take advantage of the technology that is presented to us for all industries. So if you look across the group, where can we take advantage of this enterprise, growth momentum? First, of course, the focus is slightly different. I'm going to just talk about maybe Singtel, Optus, and NCS. They have slightly different focus. I'll start with Optus, and Optus have, in the last, I would say 18-24 months, restructured the product offering of the enterprise, services in Australia.
They have exited from low margins or negative margin products and services, and refocused onto positive margin business, and primarily focusing on mobile, enterprise mobile service, as well as some of the large government accounts, like the recent win on Services Australia, and these are all long-term contracts with positive margins, so we believe that that will be accretive to the Optus overall margin.
Yeah.
And of course, in the afternoon, later on, you can ask Michael to share more about some of the wins that they are doing and what the focus is on enterprise business in Australia. In the Singapore space, you can also ask Tian Chong later on. He will tell you that the trend and the momentum is actually very strong on our 5G network slice adoption. I think we are seeing a lot of momentum in that area in Singapore. And beyond that, then you're also looking at, I would say, global companies doing transformation and how they are managing their, I would say, connectivity access worldwide.
And how, based on a platform that we have developed internally, how we are helping enterprise manage their connectivity business, not just in one country, but across the region and even globally. So that's the second area that, of course, the enterprise business in Singapore will grow and replace some of the loss in traditional carriage revenue that we are still seeing through. There will be a margin arbitrage because the traditional carriage margin of the traditional carriage revenue margin is much higher. The new revenue that we are selling into the enterprise business, even though it's a positive margin, it is a lower margin rate. So that's why you see this arbitrage, that we have to work a lot harder to grow the revenue in order to compensate for the margin loss because of the lower margin rate.
And we'll see that washing out in the next few years as we transit the business from the old carriage business into the new platform business on the enterprise side. And then finally, the third engine that is leveraging on the enterprise will be NCS. Of course, NCS will be helping companies to go into the cloud, move into GenAI, adopt GenAI to transform, as what I've explained earlier on. Every industry, every company is looking at how to deploy GenAI to help them to optimize their cost, to generate more revenue, and NCS is well-placed to take advantage of that to help company transform.
So it's really riding that enterprise growth wave, to capture it, and this is probably not just apply to Singapore, and it will apply to some of our associates as well, riding on this enterprise growth wave.
Next question, please. Oh, maybe Sukriti at the side. Yeah.
Hey. Hi, management. Thank you for taking all our questions. A couple of questions on the capital recycling front. So firstly, SGD 6 billion is, of course, the longer-term capital recycling target or medium-term target that we have. But in the near term for this year, for FY25, what are some of the levers that we can be looking at a very near term for capital recycling? And a second question, again, on capital recycling. We understand that Optus' minority stake sale or stake sale is something which is off the table in the near term, but is this something that we would, as Optus turns around as a business, is this something we could be re-looking at again at some point?
Yeah. So maybe Arthur can answer the question, but as a general, I would say we look at all our assets and, you know, if someone was to give us a, an offer or indecent offer, of course we have to look at it. But obviously we are not also looking at it and, and someone who comes in and look at bottom fishing. So we have already invested, put in another AUD 1.5 billion this year to fund the spectrum payment in Optus. So we can actually do it ourselves, and we know how to turn it around. But obviously, if there's a partner who's, who can bring some value to us in any of our assets, including Optus, we will consider it.
But we're not, you know, we're not desperate, and we're not in a hurry or urgent that we have to take a look at it. And I say, just, this applies to all our assets. It's not just,
Yeah.
Optus.
Correct. I mean, to add the, I think the fundamental thing is it has to be accretive, right? So we're not, you know, we're always, I think investors who have asked this question before, we always say we'd like to keep the markets guessing.
Yeah.
Not that we are clueless, right?
Agreed.
We do know what we need to do.
Yes.
But it doesn't make sense for us to say, "Okay, this asset today, we're selling today," right? "By end of this year, we will sell." Why? Because the price will immediately dive, right? If it's a listed company. So I think the mindset is really, we have put a lot of thought into that six billion, right? Some of the areas is, you know, if you look at what we are doing with our listed associates, which are very, very core to our business, we want to generate better business prospects. We're simplifying structures, as we are looking at Thailand, right? As what we are doing in Thailand today. And then we've got a lot of other assets in Singapore, right? That still has a lot of latent value.
And then if ever there's someone who could, who's keen on Optus or NCS for that matter, I mean, it's no different than what we did with Nxera last year, right? Again, it has to make sense for the Singtel shareholder and for the business, leveraging on all the metrics that we talked about. But that six billion of pipeline that we have, I mean, holds, and that's why we are committing ourselves to SGD 0.03-SGD 0.06 VRD. Yeah. Okay, we have one-
Yeah.
Just time for one last question. Maybe Arthur?
Hi, Arthur Pineda from Citi. Just one question with regard to 5G enterprise. You've mentioned this as a key driver. I'm just wondering, how big a segment can this be over the next, three to five years? You've talked about factories of the future. I know you talked about Micron and all in the past, and you've talked about IoT and network slicing. I'm just wondering, can this be a meaningful contributor to revenues three to five years down the road?
Yeah, Arthur, I think this question is probably asked every investor day since the day we launched 5G. This is something that I think we need to be very clear that enterprise 5G today is never going to replace the value from the mass consumer mobile revenue. Even when we were modeling our 5G investments six, seven years ago in terms of how we're gonna get returns for 5G investment, enterprise 5G is, at best, 10% of the overall scheme of revenue. I don't think that formula has changed, but if you have to look at it as a additional 10% that previously we do not have, so it's over and above traditionally what we have on 4G, right? So that becomes relevant and important because as we see the regular mobile data revenue tapers off, and you can't replace it.
In fact, if you look at Singapore in the last five years, mobile revenue has actually declined, right? So then adding that 10% or potentially that 10% becomes meaningful. And these are the type of business and revenue that has got much longer tail and stickier, and you can grow from that. So I think it's no longer experiment, and now with the 5G network mature, and there's a lot bigger or, say, more significant adoption of 5G network slicing in Singapore, we can see that the potential enterprise layer of revenue adding on is coming to fruition and realization as compared to five years ago, which is all about potential and theory.
Yeah.
I think Tian Chong later on in his breakout group can explain a bit more of some of the real use cases and how we are monetizing 5G slicing.
It appears that we have time for one last question of Dawei in the center.
Hi, it's Dawei from Morgan Stanley. I actually have two questions, if I can. So first one is actually on your recent partnership with Hitachi in Japan. Does it mean that you'll actually be building data centers in the country as well, and what would that mean for CapEx? Second is actually on non-terrestrial network, like Starlink, for example. So they've actually shown very strong subscriber acquisition growth on a global basis. What are your thoughts in terms of the opportunity and risk for Singtel, and how would that actually change, you know, telco connectivity solutions being deployed in the future? Thank you.
Yeah. I'll take the second question first on Starlink and maybe just comment a little bit on the Hitachi arrangement. I think Bill will be coming in for a breakout later, and he can provide a more, I would say, a longer answer to the Hitachi arrangement. For the Starlink, if you look at the capacity of the low orbit satellites now that is in play, there's definitely some application in terms of providing connectivity in the remote area, in the low-dense area, both as a backhaul as well as direct-to-mobile connection. But so far, when we are looking at it and doing trials and testing, I think Optus have done some trials, you will see that the usage is actually quite limited to voice and SMS and very little data.
It's really because of the technology limitations today, physics, so it will be very useful for emergency service, for some of the backhaul services, but to replace terrestrial service, it is not viable yet, and purely because, you know, in a dense area, you run out of capacity very quickly, right? Because of the high data usage, but if you are then complementing a terrestrial network, you know, if you look at a landmass of Australia, right in the middle of it, you would appreciate that because it'll help you in the areas where you've got no terrestrial coverage, and similarly for Philippines, in some of the islands, in Indonesia, in some of the islands, but it will never be cost efficient, at least in today's structure, to replace a terrestrial network.
Imagine you put up a base station in a tower today, how much it costs, versus flying a satellite and replacing a satellite. The physics haven't give us that cost advantage yet, but as an overlay, complementing, providing, access to remote areas is possible, and also in, maritime as well, replacing some of the high, orbit satellite, connectivity, and these are all, current real use cases that we are seeing, right? First of all, the Hitachi is, I must say, is a MOU. I think we are exploring many ways of collaborating. You have to understand that Hitachi is not just a partner that we say we're gonna build data center. They do provide a lot of, upstream support, as in, you know, they have a lot of equipment, generators that-
Right
Can actually provide access for data centers builder. So having a partner like them actually provides us with upstreams capability that we may need as the data center business hots up, and you're required to build it a lot faster to monetize your data center.
doesn't mean just Japan.
Yes.
So Hitachi supplies to our Singapore data centers and Indonesia.
The region.
The region.
I would say Bill, later on in the breakout, can elaborate more.
Yeah
What is this MOU all about, right? I think, you can get more answers from him.
All right.
Okay.
Okay, it appears the time is up. Thank you all for the questions. I would like to invite you all now to the breakout sessions with our of course and regional associates. There are coffee point stations outside the breakout rooms in case you all need a pick-me-up. You all can just walk there now. It's just a five-minute walk on this floor. Thank you.