Africa Lifts Airtel

Bharti Airtel reported a 7% year-on-year rise in revenues on a comparable basis for the quarter ending September 30th to 211.3 billion Indian rupees (almost 3 billion US dollars). Its customer base declined 8% to 411 million, due to a 13% fall in India where Airtel is seeing intense competition. Still, revenues in India were up 3% to 153.6 billion rupees, while sales in Africa rose 13% to 853 million U.S. dollars.

In Africa, Airtel said the total customer base using the Airtel Money platform increased by almost 20% to 15.5 million. The total value of transactions on the Airtel money platform rose 35% year-on-year to 7.98 billion dollars in the quarter. Airtel Money revenue for the quarter was 79.3 million dollars, up 51%. Source: Airtel statement

Vodafone Sees Slight Growth

Vodafone said its group organic service revenue increased 0.7% year-on-year in the three months to September 30, driven by "market share gains in Europe Consumer Fixed, continued growth in Vodafone Business, and strong mobile data demand and customer base growth in Emerging Consumer, partly offset by declines in Europe Consumer Mobile."

Vodafone said it is now Europe’s largest owner of "gigabit-capable next generation network (NGN) infrastructure" following the closure of the Liberty Global acquisition, which added 17 million cable homes in Germany and central and eastern Europe to its footprint, increasing the number of homes connected by its NGN network in Europe to 54 million.

Vodafone is upgrading its cable infrastructure using DOCSIS 3.1 technology, and aims to market gigabit broadband speeds to around 50 million households in its cable and FTTH (fibre) footprint by March 2023, compared to 24 million today. It has also launched 5G in seven European markets, with services available in 58 cities with "observed speeds of up to 1Gbps." source: Vodafone statement

Top Line Ticks Upwards for Deutsche Telekom

Deutsche Telekom reported a  1.7% year-on-year increase in revenue in organic terms for the third quarter to 20 billion euros. The growth was again fuelled by the U.S. division, which lifted revenues by 3.6% in dollar terms. In Germany, revenues rose 0.6% driven primarily by growth in mobile services and rising demand for fast fixed-line broadband.  The group also said its smart home subscriptions rose 25% to 411,000, while subs for its StreamOn proposition (its zero-rated video streaming package for mobile users) climbed 79% to 2.8 million and Magenta TV subs rose 8% to 3.5 million.  Source: DT presentation

New Services Boost Telefónica

Telefónica reported a 3.4% year-on-year increase in revenues for the third quarter on an organic basis to 11.9 billion euros, propelled by growth in the UK and Latin America.

The group said that "video revenues" rose 6.9% to 757 million euros in the quarter, supported by an increase in subscriptions to its pay TV service and  its OTT “Movistar Play” service in Latin America (the latter grew 86% in terms of subs). Telefónica also reported a 24% rise in cloud revenues to 176 million euros,  and a 33% increase in IoT revenues to 130 million euros. It now serves 22.4 million IoT connections (up 1.1 million in the quarter).  Security revenues rose almost 42% to 128 million euros.

The group’s own fibre/cable network now passes 54.5 million homes, up 11% year-on-year, with 22.7 million of those in Spain. Actual retail fibre/cable connections total 14.2 million (a rise of 11% year-on-year).

The group said: "Investment in fibre is key for Telefónica and will allow the generation of revenues and efficiencies with the capture of savings due to the dismantling of copper networks. The technological evolution of the fibre throughout its useful life of more than 30 years, will allow offering up to 10 Gbps symmetrical and optimise the deployment of 5G. In parallel, the new access network “Open Access” will support increasingly flexible and virtually controlled services." source: Telefónica statement.

Turkcell See Double Digit Growth

Turkcell reported a 14% year-on-year rise in revenues for the third quarter to 6.6 billion Turkish lira (1.16 billion US dollars). Source: Turkcell presentation

Apple Calls Out Performance of Apple Pay

Apple reported a 3% year-on-year increase in revenue to 64 billion U.S. dollars for the quarter ending September 28, in constant currencies. It said iPhone revenue was 33.4 billion dollars, a year-over-year decline of 9%.

Revenue in Apple's Services division rose 18% to 12.5 billion dollars. Apple said it now has 450 million paid subscriptions across its services portfolio, compared to 330 million a year ago. For Apple Pay, revenue and transactions more than doubled year-over-year to more than three billion transactions in the September quarter, exceeding PayPal's number of transactions and growing four times as fast,  Apple said. Apple Pay is now live in 49 markets around the world and there are 6,000 card issuers on the platform.

Apple expects to report revenue of between 85.5 billion and 89.5 billion dollars for the current quarter, compared with 84.3 billion dollars last year. It said the forecast includes a negative impact from foreign exchange of over 1 billion dollars. Source: transcript of Apple's earnings call from The Motley Fool. 

Demand from Enterprises and Africa Boosts Orange

Orange reported a 0.8% year-on-year rise in revenues to 10.6 billion euros on a comparable basis for the third quarter of 2019. The telecoms group said the increase was driven by 7.6% growth in Africa and the Middle East, a solid performance by its smaller European operations (up 1.4%) and by enterprise revenue growth of 1.8%. Taken together, this more than offset a slight erosion in France of -0.4%, and a more pronounced decline in Spain of -2.5%, "due to a general market move towards the middle and low segments."

Stéphane Richard,  CEO of the Orange Group, said: “These results further attest to the relevance of our very high-speed broadband network strategy. In fixed, the strong commercial momentum achieved in fibre, supported by our investments, is clear: we reached more than seven million fibre customers in Europe this quarter, an increase of 25% compared to last year. This can be seen in France in particular where we achieved 178,000 net additions, a record figure for a third quarter. The launch of the Livebox 5 at the beginning of October should also maintain this momentum." source: Orange statement

HBO Max Takes Shape

In May 2020, AT&T's WarnerMedia division plans to launch the new video-on-demand service, HBO Max, in the U.S. at a price of 14.99 dollars a month. The company said it is "targeting 50 million domestic subscribers and 75 to 90 million premium subscribers by year-end in 2025 across the U.S., Latin America and Europe."

At launch, AT&T will offer HBO Max to the roughly 10 million HBO subscribers on AT&T distribution platforms, at no additional charge. HBO Now direct-billed users who subscribe directly through HBONow.com will also have access to HBO Max. AT&T customers on premium video, mobile and broadband services will be offered bundles with HBO Max included at no additional charge.

AT&T said HBO Max will launch with 10,000 hours of curated premium content including the entire HBO service, bundled with new "HBO Max Originals" that expand the breadth of the offering targeted at young adults, kids and families.  HBO Max will also pull from WarnerMedia’s 100-year content collection, including library content from Warner Bros., New Line, DC, CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, Turner Classic Movies, Cartoon Network and Looney Tunes, while offering third party series and movies.

Within the first year of launch, WarnerMedia plans to expand the service to include an advertising-supported option. The company also intends to provide subscribers with "unique live, interactive and special event programming" in the future.

AT&T says it will make an incremental investment of between 1.5 billion and 2 billion US dollars during 2020 in HBO Max.  That investment includes spending on new content, foregone licensing revenue of content, operating expenses for the technology platform, and marketing. Source: AT&T press release