EE now has more than 30 million connections, after adding 54,000 postpaid customers in Q1, posting £1.05bn revenue since merger
BT saw its yearly profits rise more than nine per cent to £3.4 billion, as it posted its first results following its £12.5 billion takeover of EE.
The telecoms giant completed its acquisition of the UK’s biggest mobile operator at the end of January, and revealed revenues grew six per cent to almost £19 billion, including a £1.06 billion contribution from EE in the last two months.
Fourth quarter revenues up to March 30 was up 22 per cent year on year at £5.6 billion, while BT saw quarterly EBITDA of £2.07 billion, up 14 per cent.
Net debt almost doubled to £9.8 billion, driven by the EE takeover. It’s own MVNO, BT Mobile, which runs on EE’s network, has topped more than 400,000 subscribers just a year after launching.
BT Group CEO Gavin Patterson said: “This has been a landmark year for BT. We’ve completed our acquisition of EE, the UK’s best 4G mobile network provider, we’ve passed more than 25 million premises with fibre and we’ve also delivered a strong financial performance.
“We’ve met our outlook with our main revenue measure up two per cent, the best performance for more than seven years. Our profit before tax was up a healthy nine per cent.”
EE’s first results as part of BT
EE revealed revenues of £1.06 billion for the two months since the acquisition was completed, with operating costs of £794 million. This gave the operator EBITDA of £261 million.
It saw its total customer base grow to 30.6 million (excluding BT Mobile connections). EE added 54,000 postpaid customers in the period, taking its contract base to 15.4 million. Monthly mobile ARPU was £26.7 in the period.
Its pre-paid base fell 426,000, taking EE’s total base to 8.3 million. Overall, 15.1 million EE customers are now using 4G. Postpaid churn was 1.1 per cent.
The MVNO base and machine to machine bases increased by 28,000 and 77,000 over the two months to 3.7 million and 2.3 million respectively. EE added 11,000 broadband customers, taking the base to 951,000.
Patterson added: “The integration of EE is going well and we now see the opportunity to deliver more synergies than we originally expected, and at a lower cost. And we’re reorganising our business to better serve customers both in the UK and internationally.”