Malaysian Telcos’ Q3 2016 report card: Who’s the winner?: Page 4 of 4

Smartphone penetration and data usage

The investments that the mobile operators pumped in (see previous page) is mainly driven by users’ increasing data appetite.

A year ago, average Maxis postpaid customers are consuming 1.72GB of data a month. Today, it is 3.67GB a month. The same trend applies to its prepaid (Hotlink) customers – from 1.26GB a month to 2.6GB a month.

Celcom is also experiencing the similar trend. In Q3 2016, its customers’ average consumption was 3.2GB a month. This is more than doubled from the 1.5GB a month consumption third quarter last year.

For the first nine months this year, Maxis’ total data traffic is close to 200,000 TB, while Celcom’s at 166,400 TB. Digi did not disclose their data traffic volume.

The growing data traffic is partly driven by the growing smartphone penetration. Today, 72%-81% of Maxis customers are using a smartphone. This is significantly higher than Digi’s and Celcom’s smartphone penetration rate of 63.7% and 66%, respectively.

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