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WIND Hellas - Budget Brand Continues to Burgeon
The Weather Investments-backed company WIND Hellas operates two brands in Greece, WIND and Q-Telecom. The combined customer total of the two was 5.27m at the end of Q1 09, a gain of 73k in the quarter and 687k in the year. Both of these figures showed improvements compared to the year-earlier figures of 59k and 418k respectively. On a proportionate basis, annual growth stood at 15.0%, up from 10.0% for the prior twelve-month period.
This overview does not convey the disparity between the performances of the two brands. While the low-value, prepaid-only brand Q-Telecom added 95k customers in the quarter, WIND lost 21k, its first quarterly decline since Q2 05. This was the third successive quarter in which Q-Telecom out-performed the larger WIND brand, which had done significantly better in the previous five quarters. The annual growth rates demonstrate this shift: in the year to 31st March 2009, Q-Telecom was up 38.9% and WIND by just 7.0%; in the prior year, however, Q-Telecom declined by 4.8% and WIND grew by 16.1%.
WIND remains more than twice as large as its sister company with 3.68m customers compared to 1.59m at the end of Q1 09. However, Q-Telecom's contribution to the aggregated customer base rose from 25.0% at the end of Q1 08 to 30.2% a year later. The increased importance of the lower-value brand is reflected in the decline in ARPU. (WIND Hellas does not report separate figures for each brand, but rather gives a single aggregated figure.) Although ARPU has been falling for some time, the last two quarters have seen particularly steep drops. Q4 08 saw a €3.70 quarterly fall, and Q1 09 saw a €2.80 decline. This is partly to do with a seasonal trend, but the year-earlier declines were much smaller at €2.80 and €1.30 respectively. The Q1 09 figure of €14.00 was 25.9% lower than the Q1 08 figure, compared to a 10.4% drop in the previous year.
The financial figures reflected the steep fall in ARPU. Mobile revenues fell by 14.4% to €219.7m, while EBITDA (including the fixed and internet businesses) was down 23.4% at €72.51m.
Posted to the site on 11th June 2009
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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