News
French operator narrows loss on strong mobile, fixed customer additions.
Bouygues Telecom CEO Olivier Roussat was promoted to deputy CEO of Bouygues Group on Wednesday, as the French telco reported an encouraging set of first half results.
Roussat will continue to serve as chairman and CEO of Bouygues Telecom, but will now also assist Martin Bouygues in his duties as CEO of the group.
The appointment was announced as Bouygues Telecom reported sales for the six months to 30 June increased to €2.29 billion from €2.16 billion in the corresponding half of 2015. Operating loss narrowed sharply to €5 million from €109 million a year earlier, while net loss narrowed to €14 million from €73 million.
"The strategy rolled out by Bouygues Telecom over the last two years is paying off, enabling the company to achieve a good commercial performance and a sharp rise in sales and financial results in the first quarter," said Bouyges, in a statement.
The operator added 543,000 mobile customers in the first half, giving it a total of 12.4 million, up from 11.4 million a year ago. 58% of Bouygues Telecom’s mobile customer base were 4G users at the end of June, up from 42% last year.
"The growth of 4G was driven by a sharp increase in mobile data usage. 4G customers’ average monthly data consumption was 3.2 GB in the second quarter of 2016m compared with 2.4 GB in the second quarter of 2015," Bouygues said.
Meanwhile, fixed-line customers increased to 2.9 million from 2.6 million. Of that total, 412,000 were very high-speed broadband subscribers, which includes 70,000 fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) users.
