It was badly  burned in a mobile deal with Hong Kong’s wealthy Li family, but Telstra says its latest purchase in the region is going to make  money.

Australia’s biggest telco recently  announced it was spending $US697 million ($858 million) buying the Singapore and Hong Kong-based Pacnet.

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Telstra’s hoping Pacnet’s underwater telecommunications cables and data centres around the region, especially in China, will help grow its business customer base in Asia.

Analysts have been generally welcoming of the deal, speculation of which had been floating around on markets for some time, but at a higher price.

Speaking on ABC radio, Telstra’s chief financial officer Andrew Penn said the Pacnet business offers a unique opportunity to rapidly expand its presence in the Asian market.

“One of our aspirations is to grow our enterprise services business in the region. This is anything from managed security, unified communications – which is video conferencing as a service, advanced telephony services,” he said.

“As large companies expand into the Asian region, they have very many quite sophisticated connectivity needs associated with moving data around their networks.”

Mr Penn said Telstra already has more than 1,400 staff in Asia, plus another 2,000-plus in its majority-owned Autohome China car sales subsidiary.

However, it has not been smooth sailing for the Telco in Asia.

Telstra suffered heavy losses after buying a Hong Kong mobile business in a deal with Pacific Century Cyberworks in the early 2000s.

It finally exited that business around this time last year, selling the business back to its original owner for less than what Telstra bought it for more than a decade ago.

However, despite buying a company laden with hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, Mr Penn said this deal is a much safer proposition.

“Firstly, enterprise services, that’s at a very nascent stage, and it’s starting to grow very rapidly Asia. For example, cloud computing, where we’ve been growing more than 30 per cent per annum in Australia,” he said.

“The other dynamic is that people who want to use the internet amongst those large and rapidly growing populations of emerging middle classes is going to grow exponentially.

“And basically we will be operating probably the largest backbone infrastructure of data transmission right the way throughout the Asia-Pacific region. So we believe that puts us in a strategically very important position as that volume of data grows.”

Telstra’s other December deals

While Telstra engages in overseas expansion, it has also claims a couple of wins on the domestic front.

Earlier this month, the telco signed off on a renegotiated NBN deal with the current Federal Government to hand over its copper networks as part of its revised multi-technology broadband program.

Andrew Penn said the new deal retains the equivalent present value for Telstra shareholders as the agreement struck with the previous Labor government.

“Our focus has been to keep Telstra shareholders whole. We went into the discussions on that basis, and I think that was recognised by the Government, and I think we’ve achieved that outcome,” he said.

It also achieved a four-year deal worth up to $390 million to help with planning and building the revised NBN, with further deals possible.

However, Mr Penn was coy about when Telstra shareholders who bought in the T2 round of the float popular with many retail investors are likely to see their shares rise back to the $7.40 that they paid for them.

“I’ve learned from long experience that what you need to focus on is executing the strategy, which is what we’re doing, delivering the financial results, which is what we’re doing, and if we can do those two things right and consistently, well then the share price ultimately will look after itself,” he said.