Earnings
T-Mobile UK Rubber-Stamps Orange Merger As Profits Go On Falling
T-Mobile and Orange UK officially put pen to paper on the merger deal that will create the UK’s largest mobile carrier on Thursday morning—and the deal can’t come soon enough for T-Mobile: its profits fell 30.8 percent year on year to €447 million (£401 million) in the three months to September 30 and its customer base shrank 1.2 percent to 16.6 million since Q308.
The UK was the only European market in parent company Deutsche Telekom’s mobile empire to post negative customer growth since Q208 and group revenue was down 14.6 percent Q2 at €853 million (£766 million). So good news that the merger contract has been signed—but analysts and journalists on DT’s earnings call got no update on the regulatory hurdles the deal will have to pass: in fact the merger got no other mention by DT’s top brass and only a brief sentence in the earnings release.
Overall, execs will now hope the worst of the downturn has passed for DT: for the three months to September 30, profit rose 7.2 percent year on year to €959 million (£861 million; $1.42 billion) in Q309—beating analysts’ predictions of €830 million.
For the first nine months of the year DT made profits of just €356 million (£319 million; $529 million), compared to a €2.21 billion (£1.98 billion; $3.28 billion) profit in the same period last year. DT repeated its prediction that full-year EBITDA will fall by up to four percent from last year’s €19.4 billion.
Read more at our sister site Moconews.net.
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