Spark's chief executive Jolie Hodson Photo: Spark
The head of Spark says technological change and the cost of living crisis are two challenges the company is facing right now.
Spark's profit has taken a tumble, in what the company is calling one of the most challenging periods in its history.
Its profit was down 18 percent to $260 million.
It was also undertaking a major transformation programme to improve its performance.
Spark chief executive Jolie Hodson told Morning Report customers were spending less on IT products.
"We have a very strong mobile business, but we also have a strong IT and cloud business, so what we are talking about is seeing both reduction in spend, and people being thoughtful about where they spend their money, but also deferral of technology projects, which has led to some loss of demand, particularly in our business and entreprise sector."
Hodson said the company had increased mobile and broadband prices in the past few weeks, but that had not affected the 2025 financial year results.
Thirteen hundred people had lost their jobs from the company in the past year, which Hodson put down to the tough economic environment.
She said some job losses had been caused by AI.
"Probably 20,000 questions per month are being answered by AI assistants, which means it shortens the time of the call for the customer, improves the experience, but also removes some work for our people which is perhaps less exciting or interesting for them to be doing."
But she stressed it was only one part of the technological change the company was seeing.
"If you think about where we are as a country in terms of the productivity that we need to deliver to continue to improve and grow, we need to be able to use new technologies, and that's about skilling our people to also be able to work alongside those technologies."
Spark sold off a stake of its data centres, which was a growth area for the business.
Hodson said the business had "a large development pipeline" which required money.
Spark chair Justine Smyth said the period was marked by economic headwinds, "materially lower customer spending", and structural changes in markets.
The company's earnings were hit by a 2.3 percent decline in mobile service revenue amid strong competition, a 0.8 percent fall in broadband revenue and a near 10 percent fall in managed data and networks revenue.
IT services revenue also fell 8 percent, while cloud revenue rose just over 4 percent.
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