EuroTel Reports Record Earnings

The Slovak Republic's EuroTel Bratislava has published record earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of US$33.4 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2003. This number represented a 26.1% improvement over EBITDA of US$26 million during the third quarter 2002. The Company also announced that it ended the third quarter of 2003 with 1,457,017 customers, a 22% increase over customer count of 1,198,577 on September 30, 2002.

Net customer additions amounted to 86,024 in the third quarter of 2003, a 158% increase over the 33,314 net customer additions in the same period of last year.

EuroTel's CEO Robert Chvatal said: "In 2003 we were able to accelerate the growth of our customer base and the third quarter was the strongest in 2003 with respect to net customer additions. Although competition in the Slovak mobile market focused on low end pricing plans in recent months, we have improved our average revenue per user by over 5% on an annual basis. Our customer base structure has been developing favorably as we are successfully switching prepaid customers to our postpaid pricing plans. The 22% growth in overall number of our customers in 12 months is a promising result as we move towards the Christmas season, when we traditionally experience the highest volume of new customer additions."

"EuroTel has also done a lot to improve its GSM coverage in certain key parts of Slovakia in the recent 18 months, which allows us to be much more competitive on the coverage aspect than was previously the case. We are also very optimistic about the future of the mobile market and we anticipate mobile penetration to be very close to 70% as we move into 2004," added Robert Chvatal.

Ivan Bosnak, EuroTel's Chief Financial Officer, noted: "We can state with confidence that we beat our expectations in the three quarters of 2003, which is a good sign on the eve of the Christmas season. Margins continue to improve and we generated positive free cash flow in 2003, despite the fact that our capital expenditure was at record levels. This is in line with our budget and these investments are expected to continue to drive our mobile service revenues up as evidenced by healthy 27% increase in third quarter 2003."

Posted to the site on 14th November 2003