(Corrects to say revenue fell, not rose, in paragraph 6)
* Telstra net profit A$3.87 bln in-line with analyst f'casts
* Flags 30 pct cut in FY18 dividends
* Headwinds from new government-owned broadband network
Aug 17 (Reuters) - Telstra Corp Ltd TLS.AX said on Thursday it would slash its dividend by 30 percent this financial year, the first cut since Australia's biggest telecoms firm listed in 1997, as it buys time to seek growth away from declining traditional streams.
The bad news for shareholders came as Telstra unveiled a 1.1 percent rise in full-year underlying profit, with gains from its wholesale division offsetting falling revenues from fixed-line and mobile telephone businesses.
"Our industry is in transition, we're in transition ... we need to set our company up for the long run," Chief Financial Officer Warwick Bray told Reuters by phone, explaining the reduced dividend policy.
Profit after tax from continuing operations for the year ended June 30 was A$3.87 billion ($3 billion). The figure strips out the effect of a one-off gain from an asset sale in the prior year.
Its net profit, also A$3.87 billion, dropped 33.8 percent to its lowest in four years following the one-off bump from asset sales the previous period. That was in-line with an average forecast of A$3.9 billion, according to 10 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Revenue fell 2.7 percent to A$26 billion.
Telstra held its final dividend at 15.5 Australian cents-per-share, but its planned 30 percent cut in the 2018 financial year was much deeper than analyst forecasts.
Headwinds include the negative impact of a new state-owned National Broadband Network, which will replace the company's copper lines by about 2020.
The impact would be about A$3 billion on annual earnings, the top end of a previously-given range of A$2 billion to A$3 billion, the company said.
It expected to earn about A$1 billion a year from renting ducts and other infrastructure to the new network, and was considering on-selling about 40 percent of that income to investors.
Such a transaction could raise as much as A$5.5 billion.
($1 = 1.2620 Australian dollars)