Dodo launches new 4G plans to target customer loss

While business and consumer telecommunications provider M2 has reported the addition of 50,000 new customers for the six months to the end of 2013, its subsidiary Dodo is launching new 4G mobile broadband plans to stop the decline in customers using its mobile broadband service.

M2, which acquired Dodo and Eftel in March 2013, reported a 66 percent jump in revenue for the second half of 2013 up to AU$506 million from AU$305.2 million compared to the same six-month period in 2012. Net profit after tax was up 26 percent to AU$30.9 million compared to AU$24.7 million in 2012.

At the end of the half, M2 had a total of 1.5 million active services across voice, mobile, broadband, and energy. The largest portion of its customer base existed in the consumer division, with 385,000 broadband customers and 350,000 voice customers. In its business division, M2 has 263,000 voice customers and 41,000 broadband customers.

The company added 39,000 broadband customers, 23,000 fixed voice customers, and 13,000 energy services. M2 recorded a drop of 25,000 in the number of mobile customers for the half. Dodo wholesales mobile services through Optus, and M2's 25,000 decline in services would help explain Optus' decline in mobile subscriptions at the end of last year, which was blamed on a decline in wholesale customers.

M2 blamed the decline down to 229,000 mobile customers at the end of 2013 on a drop in the number of 3G mobile broadband customers. To address this, Dodo today launched a new 4G mobile broadband plan with 1GB of data per month for AU$15.

In the half, M2 said that it had made significant progress in integrating Dodo and Eftel into the M2 business, rationalising a number of systems and processes in the half. M2 also undertook a restructure of its consumer business, and launched new National Broadband Network (NBN) plans on Dodo with unlimited offerings. M2 now reaches out to 33 NBN points of interconnect.