Japanese communications provider Softbank saw its net sales reach JPY 6.58 trillion for the nine months ended 31 December 2016, which represents a slight decline of 0.3 percent year-on-year. Growth in its home market was offset by the impact of the stronger yen on foreign revenues. Adjusted EBITDA rose 9 percent to JPY 1.99 trillion, and net income jumped 76.9 percent to JPY 903.9 billion for the 9-month period, helped by the takeover of ARM and better results at Sprint.
The Domestic Telecommunications segment’s net sales increased by 2.5 percent year-on-year to JPY 2.4 trillion. Of this, telecom service revenue increased by 2 percent to JPY 1.8 trillion, and product and other sales increased by 4.2 percent to JPY 571.8 billion. Telecom service revenue growth was due to an increase of 56.6 percent in broadband revenue, following subscriber growth for the SoftBank Hikari fiber-optic service. On the other hand, mobile communications revenue fell 2 percent year-on-year to JPY 1.4 trillion.
The operator ended December 2016 with 32.23 million mobile subscribers, down by 71,000 from three months earlier. The cumulative number of subscribers for broadband services stood at 5.86 million, an increase of 260,000 from September. This mainly reflected an increase of 442,000 subscribers to SoftBank Hikari, while subscribers for Yahoo! BB hikari with FLET’S decreased by 136,000 and subscribers for Yahoo! BB ADSL decreased by 48,000.
US operator Sprint saw its net sales increase by 2.9 percent year-on-year to USD 24.8 billion, with an increase in device revenues more than offsetting a decrease in telecom service revenue. Sprint had 59.5 million subscribers at end-December 2106, an increase of 1.6 million from the end of March 2016.
ARM contributed revenue of JPY 138.1 billion in the nine months, up 8 percent year-on-year. Shipments of ARM-powered SoCs rose to 12.5 billion from 11.0 billion in the same period a year earlier. The chip designer sharply also increased its R&D spend, to JPY 34.9 billion from JPY 23.4 billion a year ago. ARM signed 43 new processor licensing agreements in fiscal Q3, half of which for Cortex-M products.
Softbank generated JPY 434.9 billion in free cash flow in the nine months and raised its forecast for the full fiscal year to JPY 550 billion from JPY 500 billion.
