While everyone in the mobile press pauses to congratulate Deutsche Telekom for yet another masterfully executed year, bang on the numbers, there are some disturbing trends in its 10.5% revenue growth to €69.2 billion this year.
It has achieved this while reducing employees, down 800, and increasing profits, up 11.3% to €3.3 billion, bringing mobile customers up from 156.4 million from a mere 150.5 million, and yet there are some holes, not least of which is the fact that the US attracted more new mobile customers that the entire company, which means that its European operations fell slightly, by about 2.4 million. Germany did fine, it was the rest of Europe, and most of it was explained by the fact that it decided in the last quarter to cut off over 3 million inactive pre-pay customers in Poland, a move that will have driven up its ARPU, even as it cut the number of customers.
In our territory, that of video and pay TV, there have been a number of mobile services launched across the year in T-Mobile subsidiaries, but the general rise and rise of in-home pay TV, really slowed during the quarter, although growth continued in most territories. Overall, it now has 6.6 million pay TV customers in Europe, a rise of just 123,000, around 2%. In Germany in particular it has risen just 51,000 in the last quarter, the smallest growth since it launched pay TV in 2007. Broadband services in Germany have been stable for a while as well at around 12.6 million.
In the rest of Europe pay TV was up 5.1% over the year to 3.9 million, up just 66,000 during the last quarter, which also suggests that either Deutsche Telekom is preparing a new generation of TV (which we know it is) and has paused marketing, or its older systems are beginning to show the strain. We think a little of both.
Those customers were distributed 445,000 in Greece, rising nicely; 1.45 million in Romania, still rising; 960,000 in Hungary, flat; 388,000 in Croatia, down on the year, and 493,000 in Slovakia, and growing in line with the market.
Broadband in these territories was a different story, with Romania flat on 1.19 million; Hungary flattish at 979,000; Croatia down in broadband at 636,000 lines, and Slovakia up slightly at 473,000
The T-Mobile cellular operations in the Netherlands was down, in Poland, as we said above, it was devastated by over 3 million, but it was up healthily in Slovakia and Austria and flat in the Czech Republic.
You get the feeling that if T-Mobile US was not flying along, the entire ship would crash headlong into a financial iceberg.