Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison IOH reported growth across its business in the first half of the year pointing to optimisation of operations, while revealing more AI use cases will come in the latter half of this year.
IOH highlighted in an earnings call, net profit in the first half of 2024 more than doubled year-on-year to IDR2.7 trillion (US$164 million) and total revenue grew 13.4% to IDR28 trillion (US$1.7 billion).
EBITDA is a metric the operator often highlights in its results, it grew YoY by 17.8% to IDR13.4 trillion (US$816 million). The operator announced at its 2023 Capital Markets Day ambition to double EBITDA over the next three to four years to US$20 million.
The operator added 900,000 new customers and its base now stands at 100.9 million subscribers at the end of the half. Data traffic grew 13.4% to 7,965 Petabytes and ARPU was up by 10.5% to US$2.3.
Around 22,000 4G base stations were added to its total portfolio which now amounts to approximately 188,000. It also added 103 5G base stations this year.
Building an AI large language model
IOH announced partnerships with Nvidia and Tech Mahindra at Mobile World Congress Barcelona this year, to expand its capabilities and tap into AI technologies.
The operator is currently working on building its own large language model (LLM) called ‘Garuda’ with the official Indonesian language Bahasa at the centre of it.
IOH CEO Vikram Sinha (pictured) said in the call: “We want the machine to speak in Bahasa and focus on citizen services, and you will see starting use cases from September.”
As well as its large scale technology partners, IOH will also work with universities to develop use cases centred around its Garuda. It will be integrated into the IOH app which has 40 million downloads, and there will be no extra charge to use the LLM, said Sinha.
