Hawaiian Telcom Holdco Inc., the state’s largest phone company, said Monday that net income for the third quarter was $1.5 million, or 13 cents per share, down from $2.1 million, or 18 cents per share, in the third quarter of 2013.
One-time costs relating to Tropical Storm Iselle caused net income for the third quarter to fall below the same quarter last year, Hawaiian Telcom said in a news release.
Revenue for the utility was $97.3 million, compared with $97.7 million in the third quarter of 2013.
Hawaiian Telecom said it experienced the best quarterly growth in consumer revenue since it launched Hawaiian Telcom TV, which competes with Oceanic Time Warner Cable. Consumer revenue for the third quarter increased 5.2 percent year over year to $37.1 million.
The utility added more than 2,600 subscribers to Hawaiian Telcom TV during the quarter. The company has 25,800 subscribers and serves about 8 percent of households on Oahu.
Hawaiian Telcom is expanding the number of homes that can receive its TV service. It added 10,000 households in the quarter. There are now 152,000 households enabled to receive the TV service via its fiber-optic network on Oahu.
The utility began offering Hawaiian Telcom TV in 2011.
"We have been working very hard to transform our business," said Eric Yeaman, Hawaiian Telcom’s president and chief executive officer. "Our investments are transforming the company and successfully repositioning us for the future."
Hawaiian Telcom also added 900 subscribers in the third quarter to its high-speed Internet business.
Meanwhile, Hawaiian Telcom’s legacy landline business continued to decline. Residential, business and public voice access lines were down 5.7 percent in the third quarter at 366,817. The number has been steadily declining for years. At the end of the third quarter in 2010, Hawaiian Telcom had 446,607 landlines.
The loss of landlines contributed to a decline in business revenue. Third-quarter business revenue was $41.7 million, down $1 million from the same period of 2013.
In August, Hawaiian Telcom agreed to invest $25 million over a multiyear construction period for fractional ownership in a new trans-Pacific submarine cable system which would connect Indonesia, Philippines, Guam, Hawaii and California by the end of 2016.
The cable system will help increase Internet speeds to match growing Internet traffic.
"This investment not only enables us to cost-effectively meet our future bandwidth growth requirements," Yeaman said. "It also provides us with a unique opportunity to participate in the growing demand for trans-Pacific bandwidth."