Three key takeaways you may not know about the Maxis and Digi Q3 results

• ​​Intense competition partly resulted in the declining Maxis subscriber base -- lowest level in 7 years
• Digi also had experienced its "first" in Q3 2016

BOTH Maxis Bhd and Digi.Com Bhd, two of the country's top three mobile operators, announced their third quarter financial results on Tuesday. The companies seemed pleased with the results, as they were able to improve profitability despite the challenging competition landscape.

While most of the media may have given readers the highlights of the financial results (such as revenue, net profit and subscriber numbers), we at Digital News Asia felt that there are a few interesting takeaways that may be under the radar. 

Below are some of the key highlights:

1. Maxis now have 12.04 million subscribers -- the lowest since...

From the surface level, the company's subscriber base trend seems normal. It is a common knowledge that the industry is going through challenging times.But, when we looked at the most recent subscriber base number, we wondered -- when was the last time it hit 12.05 million subscribers? 

And we started searching.

From the filings Maxis made to Bursa Malaysia, it appears that the 12.05 million subscribers it recorded in Q3 2016 is the lowest since Q3-Q4 2009. Those were the better days for Malaysian telcos, when there's still so much room for growth and telcos were growing their subscriber base by several hundred thousand subscribers a quarter. 

Next page: For the first time, Digi experienced a decline in...