Telstra's chief executive, Vicki Brady, has been paid $6.8m for the year ending in June, marking a $700,000 pay rise from the previous year's $6.1m. This increase comes despite a 20% reduction in her bonus, amounting to $607,000, in response to a nationwide network outage in July.
The company reported its financial results on Thursday, following a board meeting on Monday where the bonus cut was decided. The July outage, which Telstra attributed to a software update issue on a key time-keeping system, reportedly affected almost half of all calls and data sessions on its network.
Ms Brady acknowledged the outage, stating that Telstra had "let our customers down in July" and taken full accountability. She informed investors that over 30,000 customers had requested compensation, with nearly $1m already paid out. Telstra is continuing to assess customer claims.
The company also cut bonuses for other senior executives, including a 20% reduction for the former global networks group executive and 10% for all other senior executives, resulting in a combined pay reduction of $1.3m. Overall, senior executives received a combined $20.7m for the year.
Telstra's profits rose to $2.4bn from $2.3bn the prior year, and it paid shareholders a dividend of 21 cents per share. Mobile phone income increased by $300m to $11.3bn, with customer numbers growing by 1m to 26m services in operation, despite price increases on most postpaid and prepaid plans in May.