Potential impact of data-leak in Australia
- Optus has confirmed that 2.1m out of its 9.8m customers faced some form of data-leak
- Worst case scenario, in our view, less than 0.5% adverse impact on Singtel’s share price due to potential regulatory fine, if any.
- Maintain BUY on Singtel with unchanged TP of S$3.24
Optus has provided updated information about the impact of the cyberattack on customers. After extensive engagement with government agencies to meticulously analyzed the data for its 9.8m customers, it has been confirmed that the exposed information did not contain valid or current document ID numbers for some 7.7 million customers.
Worst case scenario, in our view, is a potential regulatory fine of almost A$105m on Optus, if any. Last time, regulatory imposed A$2.5m fine on Telstra in Dec 2021 for data-breach faced by 50K customers. Telstra had failed to follow the due process to protect their privacy while Optus is blaming this breach to state sponsored terrorists or criminals. Worst case scenario, in our view, is a regulatory fine of almost A$105m on Optus at about A$50 per customer who face data leak. Any potential fine might be a one-off cost and translate to ~0.2% adverse impact on Singtel’s market cap of almost S$43bn even in the worst case scenario.
Maintain BUY on Singtel with unchanged TP of S$3.24