By Jonathan Easton
Belgian telco Proximus has continued to experience growth in its main customer bases while experiencing a financial dip in a mixed Q3 2021.
Mobile was the biggest area of growth for the operator, adding 58,000 mobile postpaid cards. Fixed telco services also experienced growth, adding 5,000 internet and 5,000 TV subscriptions. Overall, the company’s consumer segment has a convergent base of 1.17 million customers, up 6.1 per cent year-over-year.
The operator had an underlying domestic revenue of €1.09 billion, down 0.8 per cent year-over-year. The underlying Group EBITDA for the third quarter of 2021 totaled €457 million, down by 2.6 per cent year-over-year.
Despite the financial decline, Proximus is confident of reaching the mid to high end of its group EBITDA guidance range by the end of 2021.
Proximus Group CEO Guillaume Boutin said: “Overall, I am very pleased with our results and progress on our strategy over the first nine months of the year. Financially, the organic underlying Domestic revenue remains broadly on track while we kept strong momentum on our international businesses. We continue to monitor the global supply chain shortages that can have an impact on low-margin product & handset revenues.
“In addition, we keep a high focus on our company-wide cost program, on target to achieve €400 million gross savings by end 2025. Therefore, we are confident that for our guidance on organic underlying Group EBITDA, we will land in the mid to upper part of our guidance range. With the Fiber rollout progressing well, we reiterate our expectation to end 2021 with close to €1.2 billion(US$1.4billion) Capex, excl. spectrum and football rights.
