Mobile business grows in 2016

The TDC Group's financial statements for 2016 show that the company generated revenue of DKK 21.0 billion and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of DKK 8.5 billion. The TDC Group's revenue fell by 4.1%, while earnings (EBITDA) correspondingly fell by 10.5% and cash flow (EFCF) decreased by 34.7%. However, for both earnings and cash flow, the results were better than expected at the beginning of the year.

"Thanks to huge efforts on the part of our many talented employees, we have successfully delivered a better than expected result as regards EBITDA and cash flow, and I'm obviously delighted that we surpassed our financial targets for 2016. I'm particularly happy with the development in the residential market for mobile services, where we have managed to reverse many years of declining growth, because in spite of burdensome roaming regulations, we have managed to increase revenue per customer as well as the number of customers," says TDC Group CEO and President Pernille Erenbjerg.

The mobile phone customer base, which includes both call subscriptions and pure data subscriptions, grew by 44,000 residential customers and 10,000 business customers from 2015 to 2016.

Simpler and better for business customers
In 2016, TDC Business was still under a lot of pressure, and earnings dropped 14.3% in the year, which, however, was slightly better than 2015. In the business market, TDC made a number of important acquisitions of leading cloud-based communication providers during the year so that it could offer innovative and simple products to its customers.

"We have created a Solution House, where we have brought together 400 employees with extensive experience within networks, communication and cloud-based operations. Combined with our ongoing and ambitious investments in the mobile network, it will create the integrated and simple solutions which our customers want," says Pernille Erenbjerg.

The trend with a stabilisation of the inflow of customers in the smaller segments continued, just as the development in revenue was better than in previous years.

High growth continues in the Norwegian business
In Norway, the wholly owned company Get also achieved a double-digit growth rate in 2016, which was driven by strong growth in the broadband base combined with a focus on costs.

"In Norway, we continued the integration of Get and TDC, which meant further streamlining of the business. In addition, we launched both mobile and security solutions. The mobile product ensures that we can now offer a comprehensive range of products to our customers, and with the launch of security solutions to our association customers, we have consolidated our strong position," says Pernille Erenbjerg.

Progress for the strategy
As an important part of the 'Always simpler and better' strategy, in the summer the TDC Group created a new and strong YouSee by combining its two largest private brands. However, in the short term, the accompanying IT migrations had a negative impact on customer experiences.

"Many customers did not have a good enough customer experience in the transition period between two brands and two IT systems. However, towards the end of the year, we saw a marked improvement, and we have now created a simpler model that benefits both our customers and our own production," says Pernille Erenbjerg.

The New Year's Eve breakdown in the YouSee TV signal attracted considerable attention, and marked a relapse in relation to our ambition to increase customer satisfaction.

"We're maintaining our ambitions regarding customer satisfaction, and I would like to stress that, at Telmore, we saw a very positive development in customer satisfaction during the year, so that by the end of 2016, Telmore is the brand on the Danish telecommunications market that provides the best service and which has the most satisfied customers. This shows what we can achieve when we put our minds to it," says Pernille Erenbjerg, who is looking forward to the coming year:

"2017 will be yet another eventful year with many activities. We are confident that a number of the strategic initiatives that we took in 2016 will help us to realise our goal of increased efficiency, higher quality in everything that we do, and thus a marked change for the better in the overall customer experience. With regard to the financial results, we expect to deliver a significantly improved development in both earnings and cash flow compared to the relatively large decline we have seen in 2016. For our cash flow, we therefore expect it to be stable or to see moderate growth," says the Group CEO and President, and in conclusion:

"This will require hard work and strong teamwork right across the organisation, and the result will be a simpler and better TDC for the benefit of all our stakeholders."

Please see the enclosed fact sheet for more details about the results for 2016.

Additional information:
TDC Press, tel. +45 7020 3510