By Claire Reilly

Telstra’s net profits after tax jumped 22.9 per cent for the last six months of 2011, climbing from just under $1.2 billion in 2010 up to $1.47 billion last year, with much of the growth attributable to the company’s mobile business.

“Last year we recorded one of our best years for customer growth,” said Telstra CEO David Thodey. “This momentum has continued into the first half of fiscal 2012. Our superior networks and competitive offers are being recognised and valued by new and existing customers.”

The company brought in 958,000 new domestic mobile customers – including 338,000 postpaid handheld and 436,000 mobile broadband customers – outstripping the combined figures for new customers choosing fixed broadband, T-box and T-Hub, and bundled multi-product plans.

While fixed broadband revenue was down 6.1 per cent in the second half of 2011 to $4.53 billion, the domestic mobile business saw revenue growth of 10.9 per cent for the six months, year-on-year, reaching $4.39 billion.

“The strategic investments that we’ve made across all the products, but especially mobiles, are really starting to pay dividends,” said Thodey.

“[We’ve had] very strong growth in customer numbers. If you look out over the 18 month period, it’s been two and a half million new mobile customers on our network.”

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Moving forward, the CEO said there were four key areas that the company was looking at for “business growth,” including “network apps and services, international and the digital media arena”.

Thodey noted that Telstra was seeing less positive results in its Sensis and Telstra Business divisions. He also conceded that the company’s customer service levels could be improved upon, uttering perhaps one of the greatest spiels of corporate jargon to explain Telstra’s view on the matter.

“In terms of customer satisfaction we are seeing improvements,” Thodey said. “We’ve seen a seven percentage point increase from 18 months ago, in terms of our internal surveys, about what customers are saying about us in terms of improvement. We still have a long way to go.”

“We touch nearly half a million Australians every day, and you don’t get it right every day so there’s always examples where we don’t do it well. But I can tell you when we get the problem, we do fix it, and there’s a whole new momentum in the business.”