Telefonica has reported quarterly results, including figures for O2 in the UK. It says O2’s UK mobile customer base was up 1% year-on-year to 22.5 million at the end of September 2012, with ‘pay monthly’ contract numbers up and prepay numbers down. UK revenue for the first nine months of 2012 was down 5.6% year-on-year to €5,234 million (£4.18 billion).
Tesco Mobile, which operates as a joint venture on the O2 network, increased its customer base by 20% year-on-year to 3.3 million customers; a third of these people have ‘pay monthly’ contracts.
44% of O2 UK’s customers now have smartphones; up 8 percentage points from September last year.
Overall, the Telefónica Group made a €3,455 million net profit for the first three quarters of the year, up 26.4% from the same period in 2011. It currently has 246 million mobile customers worldwide, up 6% from last year.
Eva Castillo, Chief Executive of Telefónica Europe, said “The transformation of Telefónica Europe’s business models is delivering a positive commercial performance in spite of an increasingly challenging macro-economic backdrop. The first nine months of the year have seen a quarter-by-quarter improvement in profitability as well as higher customer satisfaction scores - evidence of the Company’s unswerving focus on delivering the highest quality user experience. In the third quarter, commercial momentum was maintained - particularly in Germany and the UK - on the back of the successful new tariffs with a strong focus on smartphone adoption and the ever-growing appetite for mobile data.”
[Presentation (pdf)]