Telecom Lead Europe: Portugal Telecom will lower its Capex (capital expenditure) to around €500 million for next year from €550 million planned in 2012.
Portugal Telecom said CapEx for 2013 will come down compared to this year and one-third of CapEx will be customer driven CapEx.
The company said most of the modernization CapEx is done. Focus of Portugal Telecom will be mainly on IT, while the biggest investment will be in the CRM in mobile and billing system that will be doing after 2013, said Zeinal Bava, CEO of Portugal Telecom.
The CapEx in the nine months reached 449 million. CapEx of its Portuguese businesses stood at about 370 million, down by 7.5 percent year-over-year.
Excluding Brazil, CapEx in the quarter declined by 9.5 percent year-over-year and in Portugal it declined by 11.7 percent.
“For 2012 and despite the full rollout of the 4G network and also the investments in data center we are forecasting the total CapEx in Portugal should increase by approximately 100 million vis-a-vis is what we saw last year, the full year of 2011,” the company said.
In the nine months of 2012, its operating revenues touched €2.321 billion.
Revenues of Portuguese business stood at €682 million in the third quarter 2012, down 6.7 percent year-on-year.
Its non-voice revenues in Portugal currently stand at 51.4 percent, up by 5.1 percent.
ARPU was up 2.8 percent.
Broadband subscribers grew 6.5 percent.
TV subscribers increased 29.6 percent.
Mobile subscribers grew 7.1 percent.
In the first nine months of this year its wireline customers increased 6.3 percent, mobile customers increased 9.4 percent.
Reuters reported that Portugal Telecom’s domestic revenue fell nearly 7 percent in the third quarter due to the country’s deep recession, although a rise in the number of internet and pay-TV clients cushioned the decline.
The company said on Thursday revenue fell to 682 million euros, slightly exceeding the market consensus of 678 million, mostly thanks to the strong performance of its MEO unit that bundles pay-TV, internet and fixed phone services.
