ENTERPRISE BUSINESS GROUP

At StarHub, we prepare forward-thinking enterprises to excel in tomorrow’s digital world by empowering them with leading-edge services and products, backed by our top-notch network capabilities, to realise their digital transformation today.

Despite a challenging year, our Enterprise business continued to deliver sustained growth in FY2020 recording revenue of $645.5 million, a 12.2% increase from $575.2 million in FY2019. The improvement was driven primarily by the strong performance of our Cybersecurity business and consolidation of our new Regional ICT Services segment following the completion of the Strateq acquisition on 30 July 2020.  

Charting Our Growth

Moving into FY2021, while the macro-economic backdrop is still uncertain, this brings us both opportunities and headwinds. We intend to leverage our core strength and capability in connectivity, to maximise the returns on our core asset, supported by a comprehensive value chain of Enterprise solutions to maintain our growth trajectory.  We have identified three focus areas that we will pursue with laser-sharp focus:

First, we are leveraging on opportunities in key sectors such as Government, Financial Services, Hospitality, IT and Manufacturing, Healthcare, Information & Media, Life Sciences and Manufacturing, allowing us to capture a greater share of the growing Enterprise market. We will engage businesses seeking to expedite digitalisation in the underserved SME segment and mid-market space, by expanding our digital touchpoints and enhancing customer experience.

Secondly, we will focus on increasing our share of wallet by targeting high-growth industries such as financial services, education government and professional services. Concurrently, we will continue to strengthen our partnership ecosystem, allowing us to enhance our service and product offering with best-in-class solutions.  

Thirdly, we will pursue new growth opportunities through new technologies such as 5G and strategic acquisitions which will strengthen our enterprise capabilities and provide revenue diversification.

5G for Enterprise

Offering ultra high-speed, larger bandwidth and low latency, 5G technology promises to unlock new possibilities and applications for the Enterprise sector. Our early-mover advantage in the emerging 5G market provides us with a strong and unique competitive edge to engage early 5G adopters and play a key role in the build out of Singapore’s digital future.

We are encouraged by the positive market response to our 5G Biz+ plans, which enable enterprise customers to implement distributed working arrangements, increasing productivity and business agility. Our Biz+ plans combine 5G connectivity, SmartUC softphone capabilities and popular productivity applications in a single Mobile Office Bundle, allowing users to work 24x7 at any given location.

To lay the ground for future growth, we are currently engaging with customers who are early adopters through 5G solution trials and collaborating with partners to explore the rich possibilities the new technology will unlock in emerging industries such as private networks and edge computing.

With the aim of creating disruptive 5G innovation and solutions for the Singapore market, StarHub and Nanyang Polytechnic established the NYP-StarHub Application & Experience Centre for 5G (APEX 5G) in January 2020. Innovative and practical 5G technologies and applications developed through the APEX 5G centre will extend our portfolio of smart 5G solutions for the healthcare, retail, urban solutions and advanced manufacturing sectors.

We are also collaborating with players in a number of industries to develop case studies based on our 5G technology and solutions to enhance operational efficiencies and elevate customer experience for their respective industries. These case studies will allow us to build interests and early momentum for the adoption of 5G and grow our business in this segment over the longer term.

During the year, we partnered with Malaysia’s U Mobile to complete a multi-party roaming video conference call over 5G standalone technology to pave the way for businesses to enjoy crystal-clear and lag-free communication and entertainment across borders. Rigorous tests yielded positive results, achieving download speeds of over 1.3Gbps and latency of under 5ms on average. This is almost 10 times faster when compared to existing 4G technologies. Important performance insights gleaned from the successful trial also allows both companies to foster collaboration to establish the optimal network experience when 5G rolls out commercially in both countries.

As part of our ongoing 5G trials, we partnered a key player in the aviation industry to provide 5G coverage to support mission critical communications (MCC) for emergency situations.  We will continue to pursue growth opportunities through 5G and IoT in industries such as Construction, Logistics, and Manufacturing to develop innovative solutions for smart facilities management, robotics and logistics to drive incremental revenue streams.

We will continue to expand and harness our 5G partnership ecosystem to collaborate and innovate solutions underpinned by the convergence of fixed and wireless platforms and technologies, and ultra high-speed connectivity.

Digital At The Core

Our Enterprise digital strategies revolve around two primary initiatives: the digitalisation of our customer journey and the strengthening of our portfolio of Enterprise digital solutions.

To provide enterprise customers with a leading and differentiated experience, we are digitalising the customer journey to enhance our ability to be more responsive to the needs of the market. Our Business Manager App was revamped in FY2020 to deliver a simplified and consistent user experience across desktop and mobile platforms. Value is extracted from data to afford enterprise customers a more efficient and personalised service and reduced time-to-market product and services.

We enhanced our online store experience with a wider range of enterprise products tailored for SME customers.  Focusing on enhancing productivity and business flexibility, our improved SME product range includes 5G Biz+ plans, SIM-only mobile plans, Broadband, and Smart UC Mobile.

During the year, one of the key achievements for StarHub was the acquisition of Strateq, a data-driven business solutions and information and communications technology (ICT) company. The benefits of this acquisition are multi-fold. With this acquisition, we are able to tap on Strateq’s digital capabilities to bolster our portfolio of Regional ICT services and creating greater value for our customers on their digitalisation journey. Strateq’s growing presence in the region also opens the door to new opportunities for StarHub in other geographies, while Strateq gains access to StarHub’s stronghold in Singapore to deepen its footprint in Singapore.

Contributing $33.2 million in revenue since the acquisition completed in July 2020, Strateq is working closely with StarHub to uncover collaborative growth opportunities for both parties over the mid-term. Concurrently, Strateq has mapped a growth path of its own, identifying four growth pillars that seeks to build upon its 30 years of proven track record and in-house capabilities to build proprietary and customised digital solutions for customers.

Moving forward, Strateq intends to capture greater share of the Petrol Retail solutions market in five countries across Asia with its proprietary applications. For its Healthcare Solutions segment, Strateq intends to expand its presence in the US and Malaysia with a focus on cloud-based systems.

To grow its Enterprise Business Solutions business segment, Strateq will enhance its expertise to deliver solutions for data analytics, software engineering, artificial intelligence, AI chatbots and eCommerce. It will also enhance its cloud and data centre capabilities to engage SMEs with a total cloud solution and upsell its data centre business-continuity offering.

The Evolution of Managed Services

The data centre industry continues to evolve from hosting simple servers to enabling hybrid digital infrastructure for enterprises. With this change, there is an increasing regional demand from e-commerce, gaming, video and live streaming companies requiring multiple redundancy options with low-latency connections. Buttressed by our high-tech data centre and robust 5G advantage, we are poised to benefit from this nascent industry trend.

StarHub Hyperscale Data Centre @ Loyang located in the AirTrunk SGP1 campus was established in partnership with AirTrunk, a leading hyperscale data centre (HDC) specialist. Coming online in December 2020, our data centre affords enterprise customers access to HDC services that caters to the increasing demands from enterprises and hyperscalers such as e-gaming, e-sports and e-commerce providers. In an encouraging sign, the phase one release of StarHub Hyperscale Data Centre was warmly received by the market.

In an uncertain and challenging operating environment, COVID-19 has provided a window of opportunity for us to transform and tap into business paradigm shifts. As a case in point, with IT projects and tender delays continuing to impact the industry in the near term, we have pivoted to seize opportunities presented by dispersed work arrangements that have increased the importance of connectivity. This is especially so for enterprise customers seeking solutions to streamline the management of networks across multiple locations and data centres. On this front, we partnered Silver Peak to introduce a global SD-WAN product to the market, providing customers greater control and visibility over their network operations.

We also announced a partnership with ADVA to harness ADVA’s FSP 3000 ConnectGuard™ Optical Layer 1 encryption technology to power StarHub SDS Secured Service. With StarHub SDS Secured Service, enterprise customers managing highly confidential and mission-critical information can be assured that all data transfers between their offices, disaster recovery sites and data centres are fully encrypted, down to the fibre network level, which is operated and fully owned by StarHub.To support enterprise customers in their bid to deliver efficient AI-powered solutions by bridging organisational data with infrastructure and technology, we intend to be the digital partner for enterprises to enable their digital transformation journeys. With superior network quality and reliability, we will deliver secure services that are accessible on-demand.

StarHub had won a tender by the Singapore Institute of Technology (“SIT”), which was seeking an innovative and efficient way to improve its library operations. We worked closely with a team of global solution partners to facilitate a Facial Recognition Authenticated Library Loan Service for the university. The first of its kind in Singapore, the solution was operational in an accelerated span of two months, attesting to the effective working relationship between SIT, StarHub and its partners. With this innovative solution, students can now loan books quickly and seamlessly without the need to tap access cards through the use of Facial Recognition and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.

Demonstrating our ability to create innovative solutions, we developed BC Click for Go-Ahead Singapore, a bespoke mobile app to improve the public transport operator’s operational efficiencies and enable business insights. The bespoke mobile app simplified and automated daily work processes for bus captains, reducing time spent on paper-based administrative and reporting tasks.

Cybersecurity’s Sustainable Growth

Since the founding of Ensign in October 2018, we have charted rapid progress, recording double-digit annual revenue growth and achieving an estimated 16% share of Singapore’s security services market in our first year of operation. Given the small number of pure-play cybersecurity specialists in the region, there is a significant opportunity for us to capture a larger share of the high-growth cybersecurity market.

Our cybersecurity business contributed $220.7 million in FY2020 revenue, up 51.4% from $145.7 million in FY2019, driven largely by our subsidiary, Ensign, the region’s largest pure-play, end-to-end cybersecurity services provider. The segment also contributed an operating profit of $7.1 million in FY2020, a turnaround from a loss recorded a year ago.

In a bid to maintain its strong revenue growth trajectory, Ensign will pursue larger and more complex projects, which it has quickly built a strong reputation for. It will also continue to invest in its suite of capabilities and bolster partner collaborations to bring greater innovations to its broadening customer base, in which Ensign has identified sectorial opportunities in Industrial, Manufacturing and Healthcare.

Despite the operating challenges brought about by COVID-19, Ensign has set its sights on new regional opportunities, while concurrently deepening their footprint in existing markets. The 5G roll outs by various countries in the region will also spur demand for Cybersecurity services.

Meanwhile, Ensign’s cryptography expert, D’Crypt, has deployed over 500,000 units of enterprise IoT devices for contact tracing. This large-scale project is expected to contribute positively to Ensign’s performance in FY2021.

The Way Ahead

While the business climate continues to change rapidly with a degree ofuncertainty, our IT and digital transformations have positioned us well for the demands of the new generation and digital disruptions. We continue to augment our expertise and capabilities to support our enterprise customers in their endeavour to remain agile and competitive.

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