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Elisa - Steady Customer Growth Maintained
Elisa's home operation in Finland finished 2008 with 2.54m customers, up 8.9% year on year. Although this was up 2.5pp compared to the 2007 rate, and was in fact the highest rate in six quarters, Elisa's growth may well lag behind that of the other two Finnish operators judging from the comparative rates in previous quarters. Nonetheless, the increase in growth is impressive given that the mobile penetration rate in Finland looks certain to have surpassed 130% at the end of 2008. Moreover, fourth-quarter net additions reached a seven-year high of 54.2k, more than double the year-earlier figure of 24.8k.
Elisa also operates a network in Estonia under the name Elisa Eesti. With 0.34m customers it is the country's smallest network by customer numbers, and it lost 4.6k customers net during Q4 08. This was its first ever net quarterly loss. On an annual basis it was up 14.9k, compared to a 28.3k gain in 2007. Proportionate growth fell from 9.6% to 4.6%.
On a group level, the total customer base grew by 8.4% annually to 2.88m, compared to a 6.8% gain in 2007. The loss of customers in Estonia combined with a strong quarter from Elisa saw the home operation's contribution to the total rise from 87.9% to 88.3%.
No KPIs are reported for Elisa Eesti, but the Finnish side of the business saw a mixed set of results. Contract ARPU fell by 12.6% year on year to €26.30, partly due to a 1.8% drop in AMPU to a quarterly average of 213 minutes per month. However, the EU-enforced cut in interconnection rates was the key factor behind the €3.80 decline. The contract churn rate provided some better news: it was down 0.6pp on the Q4 07 rate at 12.0% per year.
Since the proportionate decline in ARPU outweighed the increase in customers, it stands to reason that revenues fell - and this was indeed the case, a 7.5% drop taking the Q4 08 figure to €372m. However, EBITDA was up by 2.4% to €129m. On an annual basis revenue fell by 5.3% to €1,485m and EBITDA was down 5.4% to €472m.
Posted to the site on 19th February 2009
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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