The German telco’s waipu.tv Q2 subscriber growth was higher than in any previous quarter while mobile services proved solid
German telco freenet said it remains on track in the second quarter to achieve both the targets communicated for the current financial year and the medium-term goals set out as part of its “freenet 2025” growth strategy.
The telco reported that its EBITDA for the first six months increased 5.7% to €254.6m from €240.9m YoY. Free cash flow also reached €131.5m for the first six months of the year. The company said it now expects EBITDA of €480-500m for 2023 and is seeking to increase this figure to at least €520m by 2025.
Its mobile business saw steady net new customer growth continued along with rising revenues from services. Freenet now has just under 7.5m mobile customers and said it continues to maintain a market share of 20% of the German private customer market. Revenue from mobile services hit €840.9m, up from €824m YoY.
The main reason for this rise in service revenues was the growth of freenet’s postpaid customer base to 7.4m together with a stable ARPU of €17.8. By contrast, the telco said subdued consumer sentiment in the German retail sector caused a further decline in the low-margin revenue from its pure hardware business.
“The level of competition for marketing Apple products is always high and has risen further over the course of the year, resulting in price pressure for the marketing of Gravis devices and accessories,” said freenet in a statement. “Conducting an ongoing analysis of customer preferences and market trends and constantly improving our own product range and customer experience should help to minimise any negative impact on revenue, EBITDA and free cash flow.”
It attributed some of the mobile success to its recently launched “Retail 25” assisted personal shopping project which the telco said aims to “seamlessly [link] our freenet shops to the freenet online world”.
TV and media boost
The growth of waipu.tv subscribers in the second quarter was higher than in any previous quarter and exceeded the 100,000 mark for the first time. This follows freenet’s EXARING subsidiary’s IPTV product passing the one million subscriber mark in the first quarter of this year.
As a result, the customer base has now reached 1.2m – an increase of 18.9% since the start of the year. Freenet said the prospects for the business also remain extremely bright, given the right of housing associations and landlords to pass on TV cable charges to tenants is set to be eliminated in the middle of next year. This change in legislation affects around 12.5m households in Germany and will see many abandon cable for IPTV.
“waipu.tv has firmly established itself in Germany,” wrote CEO Christoph Vilanek in a letter to shareholders.
Across all operations, the number of freenet subscribers rose by 242,000 to 9.3m in the first six months of the year, driven by strong growth in TV customers. Group revenues rose 2.7% to 1.27 billion euros from the prior year, driven by the strong customer growth.