Posted: 03rd Feb, 2011 By: MarkJ
The BT Group has today released its latest financial results to 31st December 2010 (Q4), which reveals that its UK retail ISP subscriber base has managed to increase by +188,000 quarterly net additions (up from +114,000 in Q3-2010) to hit a total of
5,529,000 broadband customers.
It's also noted that
BT Wholesale has managed to turn its broadband lines decline around and actually reported a quarterly addition of +9,000 to make for a total of 7,980,000. By contrast unbundled ( LLU ) SMPF/MPF telephone lines have continued their endless growth to reach 7,490,000 (+347,000 quarterly net adds).
Sadly BT doesn't mention any statistics for its newest FTTC (
BT Infinity) superfast 'up to' 40Mbps broadband service. Last quarter BT Retail revealed that it had 38,000 FTTC customers and was adding 4,000 per week. BT informs that we can expect to see this in their next quarterly results.
BT's CEO, Ian Livingston, said:
"Profits and cash flow in the quarter were ahead of last year. BT Retail had a good quarter with growth in business revenues and our highest share of DSL broadband net additions for eight years. Openreach benefited from a stronger broadband market and growth in its copper line base. BT Global Services is now expected to be cash flow positive this year, a year earlier than targeted.
These results show that we are making progress on a number of fronts. There is always more to do but our performance underpins our outlook for this year and the period to 2012/13."
Elsewhere the
BT Vision IPTV service (broadband TV) had +40,000 net additions in the quarter (up from +24k in Q3-2010) and their customer base currently stands at 545,000. That represents a fair improvement in growth.
BT Financial Summary
• Revenue of £5,038m, down 3%
• EBITDA of £1,484m, up 7%
• Profit before tax of £531m, up 30% (after specific items, up 111%)
• Earnings per share of 5.4p, up 32% (after specific items, up 96%)
• Free cash flow of £515m, up 69%
• Net debt of £8.7bn, down £1.4bn
Consumer
ARPU increased to £322, which is up £5 over the previous quarter, largely due to the increasing penetration of broadband in their customer base.