Vipnet increased revenues by 8.6 percent, profit by 12.3 percent

Vipnet, the second largest domestic telecom operator, announced that in 2016 it achieved revenues of EUR 398.3 million with a growth of 8.6 percent compared to the previous year. In the same period, profit before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization and depreciation (EBITDA) was in the amount of EUR 88.3 million with a very strong growth of as much as 12.3 percent. Last year, Vipnet has achieved growth in operating income (EBIT) of 9 percent to 9.4 million.

After ceasing new capital investments in the final quarter of last year compared to the same period of 2015, by 29.5 percent, Vipnet increased its capital investments by 5.4 percent to EUR 76.3 million on annual basis.

In the segment of fixed telephony Vipnet records a fairly strong growth in the number of users. In the fixed voice traffic segment, the number of users increased by 11.8 percent to 183.4 thousand. The number of broadband Internet access users rose by 17.1 percent, while the number of PayTV customers rose 7.2 percent. The average revenue per user rose by 0.4 percent to EUR 23.6. The total number of lines increased by 10.9 percent to 284.9 thousand. The above number of users does not give the total number of lines, as some users have only fixed telephony, fixed telephony and Internet, or all three services, i.e. fixed telephony, Internet and PayTV service.

In the mobile segment, Vipnet has maintained a market share of 36.1 percent on the Croatian market with the total number of 1.72 million users which is a drop of 0.8 percent compared to the end of 2015. In the segment of postpaid customers Vipnet sees growth of 1.3 percent to the total of 846.8 thousand, in the segment of prepaid customers the drop is 2.7 percent to 873.2 thousand. Of the total number of users, 131.1 thousand relates to mobile broadband, with a decrease of 5.7 percent. In addition, of the total number of users 37 thousand are M2M users with a growth of 27.5 percent.

The mobile telephony continues only a slight increase in the number of minutes spent per user per month, 1.5 percent on an annual basis so that, according to these data Vipnet user on average spent 304.2 minutes a month talking.

Looking at the revenue per user in mobile telephony, ARPU (average revenue per user) in 2016 amounted to EUR 11.9 with growth of 3.2 percent, but when M2M, and national and international roaming average are taken out of that consumption, the average consumption is EUR 11.5 with growth of 2.3 percent.

Last year, Vipnet had churn rate of 2.8 percent, in the segment of contractual users of 1.3 percent, while in the segment of prepaid users churn rate increased and amounts to 4.2 percent.

Data for Vipnet say that last year in the mobile segment, Vipnet spent for the subsidies on devices at the conclusions of new contracts EUR 9.4 million or 31.4 percent more than the year before. For subsidies on devices at prolongation of the existing contract, EUR 16 million were spent, or 26.3 percent more than the year before.