TIME dotCom expects moderate growth in 2014

• Better than expected results in FY2013, helped by strong demand for data locally and globally
• Data and data centre businesses showed growth, voice business posted marginal decline

TIME dotCom Bhd, a fixed-broadband and data centre services provider, expects its business to grow moderately this year as it focuses on increasing its market share, improving product offerings and enhancing operational efficiencies.
  
For the year 2014, it expects that demand for higher speed bandwidth services and fibre connectivity requirements by mobile operators for their network modernisation and LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network rollout will provide new revenue streams for TIME’s data business.
 
It also will look into unlocking the potential of its data centre, submarine cable and global bandwidth businesses, both locally and within South-East Asia.
 
“These abovementioned initiatives may be capital-intensive and may result in some margin compression for the group in 2014. The said initiatives are, however, necessary to ensure continued revenue growth in the future and are expected to benefit the group in the longer term.
 
“While the group expects to show growth in 2014, it expects such growth to be moderate,” TIME said in its filing to Bursa Malaysia on Tuesday (Feb 25) when it announced its full year financial results.
 
The company said it registered a “better than expected” jump in its 2013 financial performance, mainly helped by strong local and global data demand.
 
Its full year net profit more than tripled to RM641.33 million, while revenue rose 30% to RM548.26 million. For the fourth quarter ended Dec 31, 2013, its earnings more than doubled to RM186.66 million while revenue increased by 22% to RM149.24 million.
 
[RM1 = US$0.30]
 
“This is a phenomenal set of financial results that surpassed even our own expectations,” TIME chief executive officer Afzal Abdul Rahim (pic) said in a media statement.
 
“The business is only starting to benefit from scale, and I frankly can’t wait to see what the next couple of years have in store for us,” he added.
 
It is understandable why Afzal is excited as some of TIME’s past investments could be reaping their fruits soon. For example, its RM180-million investment into the RM1.8-billion Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) is expected to be completed by the third quarter of this year.
 
For the full year, TIME’s data business registered a 30% increase in revenue at RM411.6 million, while the data centre business jumped 74% to RM58.71 million (versus RM33.6 million in 2012). Its voice business suffered a marginal decline to RM74.84 million, compared with the RM77.62 million the business posted in 2012.
 
The year also saw its wholesale, enterprise and SME & Consumer segments go up by 43%, 21% and 16%, respectively.
 
The company also announced its first-ever dividend policy, promising to return at least 25% of its normalised net profits to shareholders.
 
“The introduction of a dividend policy is on the back of five straight years of steadily growing profits, and takes into account the group’s capital requirements,” said TIME chairman Abdul Kadir Md Kassim.
 
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