Indonesian telco XLSmart on Tuesday released its last quarterly results for XL Axiata before last month's merger with Smartfren, which showed the telco reporting modest growth in revenues and customers but a dramatic slide in its net profit.
For Q1 2025, XL Axiata recorded total revenue of IDR8.6 trillion (US$520.3 million), a 2% increase year on year, with data and digital services accounting for over 91% that figure.
However, its EBITDA reached IDR4.32 trillion (3% lower YoY), while its EBITDA margin dropped from 52.8% in Q1 2024 to 50.2% a year later. Meanwhile, XL Axiata's net profit after tax stood at IDR388 billion, down 29% YoY and 24% from the previous quarter.
XLSmart president director and CEO Rajeev Sethi said the results were strong when considering the market challenges XL Axiata faced, from “increasingly intense competition, weakened consumer purchasing power, and reduced public mobility during the lead-up to the Eid holidays” to devoting extra energy to finalising its merger with Smartfren and Smart Telecom.
“Despite these challenges, we are grateful that we were still able to deliver strong performance achieving positive growth in line with industry trends, maintaining profitability, and successfully completing the merger process as planned,” he said in a statement.
Sethi credited XL Axiata’s fixed mobile convergence (FMC) strategy with driving growth. “We successfully increased our mobile customer base by 1.2 million year on year. Meanwhile, our fixed broadband customer base also remained steady, reaching over 1 million subscribers. These are key factors that continue to support and strengthen the growth of our FMC business both now and in the future.”
XL Axiata’s total customer base reached 58.8 million by the end of Q1 2025, with a blended ARPU remaining stable at around IDR40,000.
XLSmart added that XL Axiata recorded an overall increase in expenses year-on-year, including interconnection fees, other direct expenses, and regulatory costs. That said, the company was able to keep operational expense growth below the rate of revenue growth on a YoY basis, in part by reducing and optimising sales and marketing costs via digitalization.
XLSmart also said XL Axiata’s customer-facing MyXL and AXISNet apps recorded over 35.7 million active users, while monthly active users (MAU) grew by 18% year-over-year. The telco said the two apps saw a 21% increase in revenue contribution in Q1, partially driven by the launch of the XL Circle feature within the MyXL app.
As of the end of Q1, XL Axiata operated over 164,000 base stations, with the number of 4G base stations increased by 7% compared to the same period last year, with 63% of base station locations now connected to fibre. This in turn helped boost traffic growth more than 9% YoY to over 2.8 petabytes, XLSmart said.
Meanwhile, Sethi said XL Axiata’s financial position remained strong, with gross debt recorded at IDR13.1 trillion and a net debt to EBITDA (including finance leases) ratio of 2.51x. Net debt stood at IDR11.6 trillion at the end of the quarter.
Post-merger, XLSmart will carry on with a market share of 25%, projected pro forma revenue of IDR45.8 trillion and a customer base of over 94.5 million as of the end of 2024.
XLSmart intends to compete largely on innovation and elevated customer experiences, and aims to be Indonesia’s “most loved company” by 2027.
