In one version of working in a business, good financial results directly lead to bigger paychecks. It looks like Singtel’s board decided that 2017 wasn’t that year. The company’s net profit went up 39.5% to S$5.6 billion, but Yuen Kuan Moon, the CEO, got a lot less money than he did the year before. Yuen Kuan Moon’s total pay dropped from S$8.2 million to S$6.8 million for the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2026. This was due to a 16.9 percent pay cut.
It’s not easy to make that kind of disciplined pay decision. It is well known that boards of directors at large companies tend to reward companies that make more money while quietly overlooking operational mistakes. The board of Singtel made a different decision, citing what it called “material operational and reputational issues.” This is a phrase that sounds mild on paper but means something much worse.
The Optus “triple zero” event in September 2025 was the main cause of concern. Optus, Singtel’s Australian subsidiary, had a huge outage after a network upgrade that lasted for about 14 hours and stopped hundreds of emergency calls across Australia. Triple zero is like 911 in this country. People call it when someone is having a heart attack, there is a fire, or they don’t have time to think. The government looked into the outage and found that it had caused two deaths. This finding is at the heart of why this pay cut is important and different from the usual changes in executive pay that don’t mean much.
In March 2026, Singtel users in Singapore also had a number of problems with their networks. The biggest one happened on March 16 and cut off service for more than six hours. It’s the kind of outage that doesn’t seem important until you’re in the hospital waiting for a call or stuck in traffic without a line. These things add up—in the minds of the public, in the attention of regulators, and clearly in the discussions that happen in the boardroom.
The contrast is what really makes the Singtel case interesting. Most of the time, the financial results were good. In the end, net profit went up by 12% to S$2.8 billion. Singtel28, the company’s strategy for recycling assets, has already brought back S$6.8 billion of its S$9 billion mid-term goal. Yuen has talked a lot about how the company is shifting its focus to digital infrastructure and AI. He wants Singtel to be more than just a traditional phone company, with goals in data centers, cloud computing, and business services. On paper, the roadmap looks like it was carefully thought out and planned.
But the board didn’t move. Also, the pay of other senior executives went down, by 11.9%, to S$25.9 million all together. This could be a real change in how the company’s leaders want to be judged—not just by quarterly profits, but also by how well the core service works when people need it the most. Some people think that this kind of accountability is more important than any public statement or apology, especially when it comes to pay.
Singtel has said that it is still working to win back customers’ trust and make operations more reliable. Those words are used so often in yearly reports that they lose their impact. The fact that the man who ran the company took on a S$1.4 million cut himself because of mistakes made while he was in charge is harder to accept. It remains to be seen whether this leads to long-lasting improvements at Optus, in Singapore’s network infrastructure, and in how the company handles important upgrades.
For now, the Yuen Kuan Moon salary cut is a clear sign from the board of a company that making money isn’t the only thing that matters. This difference is more important in telecom than most other fields would like to admit, since the infrastructure isn’t seen until it breaks down and the effects may be permanent.
