StarHub losing prepaid market share to aggressive Singtel

Prepaid revenue dropped 18% in Q1.

StarHub is ceding its prepaid market share to aggressive Singtel, a report by Barclays revealed.

Barclays estimates that StarHub has lost around 200bps revenue market share over the last 12 quarters, mainly to SingTel.

“Digging deeper into the data, it becomes clearer that StarHub’s revenue share loss has been driven by a lower focus on prepaid over the recent past. Prepaid revenues for 1Q2015 were 18% lower than in 1Q14 and 25% lower than in 1Q13,” stated Barclays.

StarHub is leaking prepaid market share primarily because it is more aggressive in the post-paid space, where it handed out greater handset subsidies in the first quarter.

“StarHub has maintained share in post-paid subscribers though. We note more aggression in post-paid was one reason for recently weaker 1Q EBITDA and profits. We acknowledge the logic but would be less concerned if we saw clearer revenue momentum as well to reflect higher subsidy and re-contract activity – this is unfortunately not so clear in 1Q numbers,” stated the report.

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