Telenor revenues on the road to recovery

Telenor Pakistan has become successful in its arduous efforts to recover its revenues, showing improvement in all macro-indictors with slight growth in the first half compared with last year.

Telenor’s results of second quarter have strengthened its financial position in overall first half of 2010. Revenues from subscription, voice and data traffic, value-added service and other mobile services posted modest growth in the recently-closed quarter.

The balance sheet also showed growth in the following indicators:

EBTIDA
Revenues in local currency increased by 20 percent mainly due to an increase in the subscription base of 2.9 million compared to last year.

EBITDA increased mainly due to higher revenues, bringing the EBITDA margin up to 33 percent despite reduced interconnect rates from Re 1 to 90 paisa since January 2010

Capital expenditure continued to be focused on network investments, and aligned with current subscription growth and traffic volumes.

The company received operation profit through the half of 2010, standing at 82,000 NOK which were showing loss of 144,000 NOK last year.

ARPU
Monthly ARPU in local currency increased slightly to Rs238 in second quarter as compared with Rs224 first quarter, showing 6.25 percent growth.

In year-on-year terms, it grew 10 percent as monthly ARPU stood at Rs215 in first half of 2009. In terms of Norwegian currency, it slipped to 16 NOK to 18 NOK due to depreciation of local currency against dollar.

MOU
The Minutes of Use surged by 14 percent on voice and SMS bundling offer in off-peak times.

Subscribers
The number of subscriptions increased by 519,000 in the quarter and subscription market share was stable at 24 percent in overall Pakistanis cellular phone sector.

Business Challenges
Energy shortages, currency devaluation, security costs and discriminatory taxation on the industry are a constant challenge, the financial report mentioned.

Source