KUALA LUMPUR: Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd remains cautiously optimistic about its outlook for its financial year ending Jan 31, 2022 (FY22) as the recent emergence of Omicron, the new Covid-19 variant, may impede the overall rate of economic recovery.

       Still, in a statement, group CEO Henry Tan said the re-opening of the economy is expected to have a positive impact on business in general, with improved prospects for the advertising and enterprise businesses.

       “The recent signing of access and wholesale agreements with Telekom Malaysia Bhd lays the foundation for Astro to become an Internet service provider, further strengthening the product bundling proposition and value that we will be able to bring to our customers.

       “The group continues to invest in its transformation plans, in particular broadband, streaming, customer experience, data, addressable advertising and technology infrastructure to simplify our processes, reduce overheads and, most importantly, to better serve our customers,” said Tan.

       Tan pointed out that Astro’s aggregation strategy execution is well on track following Netflix recently being the first of many apps to be integrated directly onto its ultra box, allowing customers to stream content from these apps seamlessly.

       “They can now enjoy the best of global streaming services with our flagship shows and live sports all in one place on Astro,” he said.

       Tan added that over 500,000 homes are already on ultra and ulti boxes, including the self-installed plug and play version that runs solely on broadband.

       Meanwhile, Astro Go has a million monthly active users with average weekly viewing time of 4.2 hours, while Astro On Demand videos streamed grew 189% to 387 million.

       “In the first nine months, our broadband base increased by 83% year-on-year as more customers bundled broadband with content for convenience and value,” said Tan.

       For its third quarter ended Oct 31, 2021 (Q3 FY22), Astro’s net profit dropped 36% year-on-year to RM105.9mil, while revenue was 8% lower year-on-year to RM1.02bil.

       Earnings per share for Q3 FY22 was 2.03 sen (versus 3.15 sen a year earlier).

       In a filing with Bursa Malaysia, the group said the drop in net profit was mainly due to higher content costs and licence, copyright and royalty fees while the lower revenue was mainly due to a drop in subscription, advertising revenue, and merchandise sales, offset by an increase in sales of programming rights.

       “Revenue continues to be impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic,” said the group.

       “Astro’s Q3 FY22 results remained resilient despite the lockdowns.

       “Astro continued to be cash generative, cost disciplined and proactive in its capital management,” said Astro chairman Tun Zaki Azmi.

       For the first nine months of FY22, Astro’s net profit dropped 10% year-on-year to RM334.3mil, while revenue was 3% lower year-on-year to RM3.14bil.

       Earnings per share for the first nine months of FY22 was 6.41 sen (versus 7.13 sen a year earlier).

       The group declared a third interim single-tier dividend of 1.5 sen per share for FY22, with the ex-date on Dec 23, 2021 and payment on January 7, 2022.