Solid operating and financial results, consistent with the long-term development strategy of T-Mobile Polska despite the lockdown at the end of the quarter

In the first quarter of 2020, T-Mobile Polska recorded an improvement in key financial and operational indicators. This improvement is the result of the consistent implementation of the business strategy of the company, which at the beginning of the quarter moved from optimization and development of a converged offer to activities aimed at increasing market power. At the end of March, the operator served 10.982 million customers, including 232 thousand contract customers more compared to the same quarter last year. At the same time, churn in the contract segment for remained at the record-breaking level of 0.7%. The operator has consistently recorded an increase in revenues from mobile services, by almost 7% compared to the previous year, as well as increases in the area of revenues from business services.

 

 

• A good plan and persistence in its implementation pay off. After the quarters in which we focused on optimizing our business model and building our offer around care for customer experience and meeting all his needs, we found ourselves in a place where all these activities translate into continuous improvement of market position. Hence, we note a stable increase in financial results. This is clearly seen in the results for the first quarter of this year: we are not only increasing the number of customers but also their loyalty. Customers are buying more and more services from us and are very satisfied with them

  – said Andreas Maierhofer, CEO of T‑Mobile Polska.

In the discussed quarter, T-Mobile Polska generated growth both in the area of total revenues, which amounted to PLN 1.557 billion, increasing by 4.1% compared to the previous year, as well as in the case of AL EBITDA profit, amounting to PLN 414 million, i.e. growth by more than 4% (y-o-y).

• A solid y-o-y EBITDA growth is consistent with our assumptions and means that our turnaround strategy works not only in the operational, but also in financial terms. The last two weeks of the first quarter were clearly impacted by a general market slowdown due to a pandemic and store closures, so the fact that even under these circumstances we managed to deliver a satisfactory result demonstrates the stability of the company and prove our healthy financial situation

  – says Juraj Andras, CFO of T‑Mobile Polska.

 

The best network and customer centricity ensured also during a pandemic

In mid-February T-Mobile launched the campaign "Best network guarantee or money back". Thanks to this campaign, individual customers could take advantage of the offer with a subscription or pre-paid phone and then withdraw within 30 days, receiving a full refund. The construction of the offer was an expression of the operator's conviction about the quality of its services and concern for the satisfaction of customers who received a chance to test the offer. The vast majority of users appreciated the quality of T-Mobile services – only 3% of all customers took the option to withdraw from the contract.

The following weeks of T-Mobile's operations were also marked by a focus on customer satisfaction as well as additional support for T-Mobile users during the pandemic. Since the introduction of governmental COVID-19 restrictions, T-Mobile has been offering weekly, free gigabytes of data to customers as part of the Happy Fridays campaign. In April alone, the packages in "Mój T-Mobile" application were used nearly 2 million times, and since the beginning of the year it has been over 4.5 million downloaded gifts.

The coronavirus epidemic has clearly marked its presence in the form of customer service. With the operator's stores closed, interactions with customers have been shifted to remote channels – Contact Center and store consultants served customers from the home office, which allowed to maintain constant contact with users and smoothness of all sales and service processes. At the same time, T-Mobile was the first infrastructure operator in Poland to launch customer service via WhatsApp. Last but not least, customers are increasingly willing to manage their services in the "Mój T-Mobile" application. In the first quarter of 2020 it was used by an average of over 41% of active individual customers base, and in April 2020 it was already 47%.

Growth in B2B across all segments

In the first quarter of 2020 T-Mobile saw a growth in the B2B segment. In the smallest and medium business sector, the operator enlarged its customer base as well as penetration of MagentaBIZNES offers catering to a full spectrum of their needs. At the end of the quarter, these offers were being used by 60% of VSE and SOHO clients. At the same time T-Mobile in cooperation with its subsidiary T-Systems managed to improve revenue stream coming from larger accounts, both from core telco products as well as ICT services such as cloud, data center and networking, security or workplace digitalization.

The operator also made significant headways in developing its data center offering. By the end of March the Szlachecka Data Center project was awarded ANSI / TIA-942-B: 2017 Rated-3 certificate, which means that all of the object’s components are fully redundant and it will be able to meet expectation of even the most demanding clients. Right now, a process of choosing the general contractor of construction works is underway. In parallel works on implementation of Data Center Networking as well as hybrid and private cloud offerings were being finalized which lead to their launch by the end of April.

Network modernization and maintaining the best quality under growing demand

Currently, T-Mobile customers can take advantage of 11,550 base stations in Poland, of which over 9,330 already offer aggregation of 2 to 4 frequency bands - the capacity of nearly 2,500 stations has been increased this way only this year. An important element of projects implemented since last year was the preparation of the network to support 5G technology using the 2100 MHz frequency, which is already owned by T-Mobile. Already in February T-Mobile had 800 such stations, and in May this number increased to 1460. According to the adopted project, T-Mobile plans to prepare by the end of the first half of 2020 1600 stations servicing the 5G network on their frequencies.

In the end of the first quarter of this year a sharp increase in the demand for telecommunications services took place. Within just a few days, the average daily demand for voice services increased by over 40% and for mobile Internet access services by 20-25%. In April and May, the demand for services remained at similar levels. The T-Mobile network was well prepared for this sudden growth thanks to consistent investments in network expansion and modernization. This is demonstrated by both the Best in Test certificate for the best mobile network awarded for the fifth time in a row by an undue research company, as well as the results of speedtests performed by operators' clients.