BT Group announced its revenue, EBITDA, Capex, Opex, ARPU and profit for the second quarter of fiscal 2018-19.
BT Group has reported revenue of £11.588 billion (–2 percent), profit before tax of £1.340 billion, EBITDA of £3.675 billion (+2 percent) and capital expenditure (Capex) of £1.833 billion (+£140 million) in the quarter ended September 30, 2018.
BT’s pre-paid ARPU from mobile business was £8.3 against £8.2. BT’s post-paid ARPU from mobile business was £22 against £22.1. BT’s ARPU from fixed business was £38.3 against £37.8.
BT generated revenue of £5,272 million (+3 percent) from Consumer, £2,195 million (–4 percent) from Business and Public Sector, £929 million (–8 percent) from Wholesale and Ventures, £2,332 million (–7 percent) from Global Services and £2,472 million (–1 percent) from Openreach in the first half of 2018.
BT’s incoming CEO Philip Jansen will present the next quarter’s financial results after Gavin Patterson was removed from the CEO position as he could not meet the financial target of the UK telecom operator.
BT’s H1 Capex was £1.833 million, as against £1.693 million, including network investment of £988 million, up 15 percent due to an increase in our base-case assumption for customer take-up under the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) program. BT’ Capex spending was £327 million on systems and IT, and £75 million on non-network infrastructure.
Service improvement
BT is able to offer a provision first appointment date within 12 days to over 99 percent of customers against 85 percent in Q2 2017-18.
Missed appointments, where Openreach was at fault, were 1.7 percent over the quarter. BT is ahead on all 42 copper and fibre Minimum Service Level (MSL) measures set by Ofcom. BT reduced the number of faults in the UK copper network, delivering 1.3 percent reduction compared to Q2 last year.
BT has reduced the average time to provide service from 43 working days to 34 in the same period.
BT achieved 2.8 million cumulative My BT downloads, My EE registrations rose 14 percent year on year and around 10 percent of the Plusnet mobile base installing their app within 2 weeks of launch/
Over 3 million customers are using our Call Protect product preventing over 170m unwanted calls since launch.
EE demonstrated 5G capability from a live site in Canary Wharf. EE’s network won RootMetrics awards in all six performance categories, including the UK’s best mobile network in nationwide testing for the fifth year in a row.
EE announced that it will be converting mobile spectrum from 3G to 4G, to enable faster mobile data speeds. The maximum capacity 4G sites in the UK’s busiest hotspots lay the foundation for 5G network switch on in 2019.
Openreach’s fibre broadband is now available to 27.2 million premises. Openreach has now passed nearly 1.3 million premises with its Gfast network and more than 680,000 with its FTTP network.
Openreach completed around 600,000 fibre broadband net connections in the quarter and more than one million for the half year, and now have more than 10.5 million customers connected to fibre.
Openreach announced a reduction in the price for FTTP for small-scale developments of less than 30 properties.
BT removed 2,000 job roles, with the largest element being from Global Services. The job cut will result into an annualised benefit of over £350 million with an associated cost of £206 million. BT Group also completed the transfer of 31,000 employees to Openreach.
