SFR Reports Steady Revenues Growth

The French mobile network, SFR - a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal reported that Q1 2006 revenues grew by 3.4% (by 2.9% on a comparable basis) to US$2.6 billion. The favorable effects of the increase in customer base along with the growth in "voice" and "data" usage are partly offset by the strong cut of regulated tariffs as from January 1, 2006 (a 24% cut of mobile voice termination rates and a 19.4% cut of SMS termination) and by the cut in the price of communications charged to customers for the new offers launched in mid 2005. SFR twelve months rolling ARPU5 decreased by 1.8% to US$591 in March 2006 (versus US$601 in March 2005).

Excluding the impact of the regulated tariffs' cut, SFR total revenues would have been up by 7.2%.

SFR proved ongoing commercial dynamism during the quarter, with 130,000 new customers, taking its total registered customer base to 17.328 million, an 8.3% increase versus the end of March last year. The postpaid customer base grew by 12.7% year-on-year to 11.039 million, leading to an improved customer mix of 2.5 percentage points in one year.

3G customers reached 1.352 million as of March 2006 compared to 1.003 million at the end of December 2005.

Average voice usage of SFR customers (AUPU) continued its growth at 14.3% to 309 minutes per month.

Net data revenues improved significantly to represent 13.5% of network revenues for the first quarter of 2006, compared to 11.8% in 2005, partly due to an 18% increase in text messaging (SMS) sent by SFR customers (1.6 billion), to the multiplication by 1.7 times of MMS sent (43 million) and to the strong increase of other services. The latter now represent 31% of total data revenues compared to 27% in 2005. At end of March 2006, the data ARPU reached US$75.30, a 14% growth compared to 2005."

Posted to the site on 24th April 2006