KDDI reaffirmed its full-year revenue and profit forecast for the fiscal year to end-March 2023, despite significant financial liabilities stemming from a network outage and weakness across its mobile business.

In May, KDDI predicted around 2 per cent growth in net profit and operating revenue to JPY688 billion ($4.67 billion) and JPY5.56 trillion respectively.

The operator used its fiscal Q2 2023 (ending 30 September) earnings presentation to outline plans to improve the quality of its network by accelerating the implementation of virtualised infrastructure with a JPY50 billion investment.

Net profit fell 5.2 per cent year-on-year to JPY162.6 billion, attributed to the network failure, with a JPY5.9 billion charge and rising energy costs.

Consolidated operating revenue increased 4.9 per cent to JPY1.4 trillion, as a 7.5 per cent increase in business services to JPY273.4 billion offset an 8.4 per cent drop in mobile service revenue to JPY396.7 billion.

The operator expects weakness in mobile bottoming-out over the next two quarters.

It forecast ARPU to rebound to JPY4,000 by the end of the fiscal year after an 8.2 per cent fall in the recent quarter to JPY3,920, its fifth consecutive decline.

Handset sales were flat at JPY166.8 billion.

Mobile subscribers rose 2.7 per cent to 62.4 million. It added 4.3 million users to its au Pay platform for a total of 38.9 million.

IoT connections increased 33.3 per cent to 28 million.

Its full-year capex guidance of JPY680 billion is unchanged from fiscal 2022.