Dear Shareholders,
The worst of the pandemic is in the rear-view mirror, but the past year has been no less challenging than when COVID first appeared. In that time, we’ve made and undergone profound changes within our Group. We tackled the pandemic head on, mitigated the pressures it put on our business, and also exploited this catalyst of digitalisation to prime and position our company for the eventual resumption and recovery of the economy. Against this backdrop, the Group put in a resilient performance, with net profit jumping two and a half times to S$1.95 billion on the back of a net exceptional gain that included gains from the divestment of the Group’s 70% equity stake in Australia Tower Network. Optus and Airtel also staged strong turnarounds.
Emerging from COVID
Amid the throes of the pandemic, it was patently clear we couldn’t afford to take a defensive approach to the global health and economic crisis. With the pandemic in its second year and still no clear end in sight, we had to move well beyond disaster recovery, business continuity planning and day-to-day remediations. The unprecedented digitalisation we were witnessing meant that the business environment waiting for us after this crisis would be vastly different from the one we had known prior. With no playbook for a disruption of this magnitude and urgency, we went on the offensive and shifted our resources and focus to building a new pathway that would ensure our relevance.
Our strategic reset – one year on
A year on, we have successfully recast NCS as a new growth engine and taken it regional in Australia and China with scaled operations. We have grown our digital bank venture: our digibank with Grab is slated to launch in Singapore this year; we won another full digital banking licence in Malaysia with a consortium of partners; and acquired a minority stake in Bank Fama in Indonesia. From data centre to tower assets, we have leveraged our quality infrastructure to unlock value, recycle capital and drive growth. Building on our Singapore data centre operations, we’ve created a regional data centre business that’s riding on the ubiquity of cloud adoption. Our longtime business associates, Telkom in Indonesia and Gulf and AIS in Thailand are among our first partners in this new venture. We’ve also divested 70% of our tower assets in Australia, teaming with AustralianSuper, the country’s largest superannuation and pension fund, to build a stronger tower business worth some A$5.8 billion. The returns and funds raised by these actions will be reinvested in strategic projects such as our 5G infrastructure buildout that serves as the backbone of our business, underpinning both our core and digital offerings. On this front, we’ve established 5G leadership, enabling some of the fastest speeds in Singapore and Australia’s biggest cities. Our 5G coverage in Singapore now spans more than three-quarters of the country and we expect nationwide coverage before year end.
Empowering every generation
The progress we’ve made so far is the result of keen execution discipline. We knew this was critical when we reset our strategy. More than a business transformation, we needed a performance transformation to achieve our intended outcomes and build momentum for the longer term. This meant convincing everyone, not just senior leaders, of the need for the reset and a new way of working that would carry us forward. We reached out across the Group, rethinking our business and vision, identifying our strengths and challenges. Collectively, we arrived at Singtel’s first ever purpose statement – Empower Every Generation – a pledge to harness the power of technology to empower and benefit all our stakeholders: from our people to customers, shareholders and the wider community. Our people being our greatest asset, we started empowering our workforce to bring the strategy to life and deliver sustained outcomes for business. We did this by refreshing our set of core values to address desired shifts in behaviour and culture that would underpin the sustainability of our reset: cultivating a growth mindset, operating with integrity, taking ownership, and constantly challenging ourselves to serve our customers and stakeholders better.
