Speaking of buyouts, M1?
InternetZDNet Australia had these articles under the More From Australia heading:
Maybe they think Trump news is Australian because we’re the 51st state. And if SingTel can run Optus, M1 can run another Australian phone company?
But from the latter article by Connie Reichert:
Operating revenue was up by 10 percent to SG$275 million; however, operating expenses were up by 14 percent to SG$231 million … However, it lost 152,000 prepaid customers over the same period, down to 584,000, for total mobile customer base of 1.95 million, down from just over 2 million this time last year. According to M1, it holds 23.5 percent of the Singaporean mobile market.
I’d be sad to see M1 go, and not just because they’ve bucked the trend and kept their angular logo. They were around before StarHub, their little orange Motorola pagers were ubiquitous when my family and I first moved there in the 1990s. I was always on SingTel, but most of my friends’ Nokia 3310s were on M1. Hmm, maybe there’s a theme here.
But Singapore’s a comparatively small market, I was surprised it could service multiple telcos of that size. They’ve since launched fibre to homes — who’d have thought there’d be demand for that, Australian LNP — but the bulk of their revenue still came from mobile:
M1’s mobile telco services brought in the most operating revenue, at SG$142.6 million: SG$129.4 million from post-paid and SG$13.2 million from prepaid after the carrier added 90,000 post-paid customers during the past year for a total of 1.36 million.
As another pointless aside, I always liked the design of the M1 store in the Paragon. They were doing the couches and coffee style shop before any other utility company or bank in either Australia or Singapore.
