(Reuters) -Australia's top telecom firm Telstra Group posted nearly a 16% drop in its full-year profit on Thursday, as growth in its mobile segment was outweighed by the weak performance of enterprise and wholesale business.
Telstra's fixed enterprise segment, which provides tech solutions, network capacity and cloud services to government and large businesses, continued to struggle amid heightened competition and constrained customer spending.
This clouded the benefits from margin expansion in the company's mobile business, on the back of higher prices for mobile and data plans and customer growth.
The company said its profit attributable was A$1.62 billion ($1.07 billion) for the fiscal ended June 30, compared with A$1.93 billion a year ago and the Visible Alpha consensus estimate of A$2.00 billion.
Its underlying net profit after tax, however, rose 7.5% to A$2.3 billion.
Telstra also announced a final dividend of 9 Australian cents per share, higher than the 8.5 cents declared a year ago.
($1 = 1.5161 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by John Biju and Himanshi Akhand in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
