Telkom books 15% increase in net profit

JAKARTA (JP): Publicly-listed telecommunications company PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia announced on Friday a 15 percent increase in its net profit in 2000 to Rp 2.54 trillion ($258.2 million) compared to Rp 2.2 trillion the previous year.

The company said the increase resulted from a significant rise in total operating revenues, especially from telephone charges and earnings from its five Joint Cooperation Scheme (KSO) partners.

Total operating revenues grew by 20.35 percent to Rp 9.37 trillion last year from Rp 7.8 trillion in 1999, while total operating expenses only grew 10.14 percent to Rp 5.3 trillion in 2000 from Rp 4.85 trillion the previous year, it said in a statement.

"These resulted in a 37.16 percent increase in operating income to Rp 4.03 trillion in 2000 from Rp 2.94 billion in the comparable period of 1999," the state-owned company said in the statement.

Telkom said that as of Dec. 31, 2000 its total debt reached Rp 10.4 trillion, some 41.76 percent of which was denominated in rupiah and the rest in various foreign currencies.

Last year the company spent Rp 2.1 trillion on capital expenditures, of which Rp 1.2 trillion was spent on infrastructure development, Rp 734.4 billion on services such as Phone-Net, Internet, and Service-Net, and Rp 203.1 billion for support business.

Telkom installed 199,581 lines of switching capacity in 2000, and completed 287,548 new lines of cable network.

As of Dec. 31, 2000, Telkom and its five KSO partners operated a total of 6.66 million telephone lines, 3.61 million lines are located in Telkom's operational zones in Jakarta and East Java, and 3.05 million lines in the partners' areas across the country.

The company installed 582,412 new telephone lines in the whole of last year, 14.52 percent higher than the 508,549 new telephone lines installed in 1999, it said.

Of the new telephone lines installed in 2000, 353,371 were added in the Telkom regions and 229,041 in KSO zones.

Telkom said that some 176,478 subscribers had canceled their subscription during the period, which was lower than the 232,343 lines canceled in 1999.

About 77.5 percent of those who canceled their subscription were residential subscribers, 21.51 percent were business subscribers, and the rest social subscribers, it said.

The company recorded a 65.21 percent growth of Indonesian cellular subscribers to 3.7 million subscribers in 2000 compared to 2.22 million in the same period in 1999, with pre-paid subscribers consisting of about 60 percent of the total.

In line with the government's policy to terminate the cross ownership between Telkom and another state-owned telecommunication company PT Indosat, on Feb. 15, 2001 the two companies had signed an memorandum of understanding which would effectively resolve the joint ownership arrangement.

In a series of transactions amounting to $1.5 billion; Telkom would acquire Indosat's 35 percent interest in cellular company PT Telkomsel for $945 million.

Indosat would acquire Telkom's 22.5 percent interest in cellular company PT Satelindo for $186 million, Telkom's 37.66 percent interest in Lintasarta for $38 million, as well as the assets of the Central Java KSO region run by PT Mitra Global Telekomunikasi Indonesia (MGTI) for $375 million.

On the completion of the transactions, Telkom would pay Indosat an amount of $346 million, Telkom said.

The transactions are subject to certain conditions including regulatory and corporate approvals, Telkom said, adding that it anticipated that both Telkom and Indosat would seek shareholders' approval by the end of April 2001.

Additionally, Telkom said that it had signed a contract with PT Siemens for the procurement of the DCS-1800 system in Dec. 2000, for which a technical test has been conducted in the Jakarta area.

Commercial launching was projected in the fourth quarter of 2001 covering Jakarta, Bandung, Lampung, with expansion to Surabaya, Denpasar, and Batam.

The license, as well as a license to operate international basic telecommunications services, was considered as part of the compensation for the early termination of Telkom's exclusive rights to operate a local fixed line service.

Telkom had also signed an agreement with C2C Pte. Ltd. in Nov. 2000 to be a landing party for a new submarine cable system over the Southeast Asia and Trans-Pacific regions.

Telkom will utilize this system to prepare its international business infrastructure for broadband communications, it said. (tnt)