BT CEO Gavin Patterson announced the UK-based telecom operator’s reductions in Opex and strategies towards Capex related investments in Q3 fiscal 2018.

BT’s Q3 revenue reached £5,970 million (–3 percent) mainly due to £16 million impact from foreign exchange and £45 million reduction in transit revenue.

BT has generated Q3 revenue of £1,261 million (flat) from Consumer, £1,357 million (+4 percent) from EE, £1,125 million (–5 percent) from Business and Public Sector, £1,266 million (–9 percent) from Global Services, £506 million (–4 percent) from Wholesale and Ventures and £1,286 million from Openreach.

BT has reduced operating costs by 5 percent to £5.116 billion, reflecting cost savings. BT achieved cost reduction despite increasing investment in mobile devices, customer experience, higher business rates and pension costs. Adjusted EBITDA of £1.826 billion was down 2 percent.

BT has marginally increased its capital expenditure (Capex) to £878 million as against £852 million in the same quarter previous fiscal – mainly reflecting increased investment in fixed and mobile networks. BT increased its investment in fixed and mobile networks by £45 million to £465 million. BT’s spending on customer driven investments was £232 million and £157 million on systems and IT.

BT Consumer 12-month ARPU increased 5 percent to £41.3 per month. BT added 208,000 superfast fibre broadband subscribers to reach 5.5 million. 59 percent of broadband customers are now on fibre. BT added 35,000 broadband customers. BT has reduced customer complaints by 7 percent for landlines and 11 percent for broadband. Operating costs rose 1 percent mainly due to increased investment in customer experience and broadband speed upgrades.

EE has a mobile subscriber base of 29.8 million. EE added 235,000 post-paid customers, taking the post-paid subscriber base to 17.5 million. EE pre-paid customers fell by 299,000, taking the base to 6 million. Monthly mobile ARPU was £26.2 for post-paid customers and £4.9 for prepaid customers across the Group. EE’s 4G customer base reached 19.6 million in 2017. EE’s capital expenditure fell 20 percent to £122 million.

BT said Openreach has expanded the fibre broadband to more than 27.4 million. 886,000 of those premises are able to connect to an ultrafast (100Mbps+) service using FTTP or Gfast technology. Openreach added 600,000 fibre broadband connections to reach 9.2 million customers connected to fibre. Openreach made a capital expenditure of £477 million, up £68 million or 17 percent, reflecting investment in fibre broadband speed and coverage.

Baburajan K