Roughly 30 percent of the 141.5 million subscribers at Telkomsel now have access to mobile devices with 3G/4G capability as of March. This has helped Telkomsel achieve a 38 percent increase in revenue from mobile broadband to Rp 4.2 trillion in the first quarter this year, accounting for a quarter of its revenue. (JG Photo/ Dhana Kencana)
Jakarta. Network operators in Indonesia are reaping gains from a surge in data usage during Ramadan season this year, further cementing the rise of revenue from mobile data services among telecommunication companies amid lagging growth of voice and text services across the nation.
Telekomunikasi Selular, the cellular subsidiary of state-controlled Telekomunikasi Indonesia, reported a 140-percent increase in data usage, to 1.5 million gigabytes, during the day of Idul Fitri, last Friday, compared to the same period last year, according to an official statement from the company on Monday. The traffic was 14 percent higher than on a normal day in 2015, according to the company, which also known as Telkomsel.
Meanwhile, voice services grew 13 percent to 1.4 billion minutes compared to last year and up 1 percent compared to the usual daily usage. Text messaging services dropped by 4 percent to 957 million text messages from last year and slipped by 3 percent compared to a normal day this year.
Telkomsel’s revenue from data services was Rp 47,009 ($3.51) per gigabyte in the first quarter this year, according to calculations by GlobeAsia based on the company latest financial report. Revenue from voice services was about Rp 166 per minute, while revenue from text messaging services stood at roughly Rp 55.2 per message.
That means Telkomsel could rake in an estimated Rp 70.5 billion of revenue from data traffic during Idul Fitri alone, above text messaging services that would contribute Rp 52.8 billion in revenue. Voice services, on the other hand, could contribute as much as Rp 232 billion, according to GlobeAsia calculations. Representatives from Telkomsel have not confirmed the figures.
Roughly 30 percent of the 141.5 million subscribers at Telkomsel now have access to mobile devices with 3G/4G capability as of March. This has helped Telkomsel achieve a 38-percent increase in revenue from mobile broadband to Rp 4.2 trillion in the first quarter this year, accounting for a quarter of its revenue. On the other hand, revenue from text messages only grew by 5.1 percent to Rp 3.2 trillion.
A similar upward trend in data usage was seen at Telkomsel’s competitor, Indosat, a network operator controlled by Qatar’s Ooredoo Group.
“We’ve been seeing a significant increase in data usage in Indonesia in the past three years. Our data traffic during the Ramadan holiday this year has doubled compared to last year,” Adrian told GlobeAsia in a text message on Monday.
Data usages among 66 million of Indosat’s cellular subscribers jumped 37 percent higher on Sunday — compared to the daily average usage this year, according to Adrian.
For years, many companies in Indonesia, from consumer goods producers to apparel retailers, have benefited from the Ramadan celebrations, a shopping season for most Indonesians before they return to their hometown to celebrate the Islamic holiday with their families.
As more people look for entertainment online and turn to messaging apps like Facebook’s Whatsapp and Japan’s Line messenger to communicate, the needs of the Indonesian consumers today have expanded to a new territory: Internet data packages. Revenue from mobile broadband at Telkomsel, for instance, surpassed text messaging services for the first time last year.
As many as 88.1 million Indonesians used the Internet last year, a 16.2-percent increase from 71.9 million users in the year before, according to a survey by the Indonesia Internet Providers Association and the University of Indonesia.
Many experts have attributed the growth of mobile broadband in Indonesia to the spread of low-cost smartphones, such as those provided by Chinese company Xiaomi and Google’s Android One.
GlobeAsia
