The Croatian incumbent Hrvatski Telekom (HT) saw the TV customer base in its home market grow by 17.4% to 491,000 in 2019.
This, according to the company in its latest set of results, was due to successful M&A activities and including the EvoTV pay-DTT service, which became part of HT’s portfolio last year. This helped boost TV ARPU by 2% to HRK85.3 (€11.4).
HT notes that although its MAXtv SAT service declined by 4.1% compared to the previous year due to competitors’ aggressive promo campaigns, the MAXtv customer base grew by 1.8%. The latter was due to continued improvements in its programming and the introduction of the MAXtv Mini offer.
Although HT’s total revenues in Croatia fell by 0.6% in 2019 to HRK7,119 million, within them those for TV and broadband increased by 2.3% to HRK1,323 million. EBITDA fell by 5.4% to HRK2,920 million and net profit by 29.2% to HRK741 million.
Meanwhile, in Montenegro HT’s subsidiary ended 2019 with 71,000 TV customers, or 9.7% more than a year earlier, while TV and broadband revenues were 0.2% lower at HRK116 million.
Commenting on the business results for 2019, Konstantinos Nempis, CEO of HT, said “As the largest private investor in the digitalisation of Croatia, we continue with bringing technology to every corner of Croatia to ensure equal opportunity for a quality life to all of our citizens. We invested the biggest amount of CAPEX in the last 10 years progressively turning around our service revenues, by increasing BB and TV customer bases and increasing mobile ARPUs via more for more propositions. The investment in our mobile network has enabled us to triple the capacity of the network and increased the user speed by 75% compared to the pre-modernization status. We achieved availability of 4G mobile network service in the entire Croatian territory, hence created infrastructure preconditions for rural development but also provided sufficient capacity during tourist season. Furthermore, the new, modernised equipment is “5G ready”. I’m also proud on our Partnership Agreements with local and regional governments in which we committed to develop optics for 135,000 customers across Croatia. All of this is a crucial basis for connecting everyone in Croatia to the opportunities of digitisation. And I can promise you, we will not stop until everyone in Croatia is connected.”
