Telia Lietuva results for the six months of 2020 - Seite 2

Quarantine didn’t prevent us from implementation of our ongoing projects. We continued creation of customer experience worth sharing – we speeded up refurbishing of our flagship shops in the largest shopping malls in Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipėda while they were closed due to quarantine. We secured a contract for implementation of the national cloud computing services infrastructure, a project that shall consolidate state-run IT infrastructure and reduce the costs. For employees of our business customers we offered benefits of converge offer Telia1 – more data, speed and content.

The Ministry of Finance of Lithuania forecasts that the country’s economy will contract by 7 per cent in 2020 but will grow in 2021 by 5.9 per cent. Inflation will go down to 0.7 per cent this year and will go up to 1.7 per cent next year. Unemployment level in 2020 will increase up to 9.5 per cent, while in 2021 it will decrease to 8.1 per cent.

We observe that mobile devices sales are back to pre-quarantine level, businesses are re-ordering suspended services. From mid-March imposed lockdown led to greater demand for connectivity speed, VPN solutions, mobile signature as well as such equipment as PCs and TV sets.

As a result, number of customers continued to grow despite fierce competition and over the last twelve months:
- number of IPTV users increased by 5.1 per cent up to 249 thousand,
- number of mobile service subscriptions grew by 3.8 per cent up to 1,355 thousand,
- number of FTTH Internet connections went up by 2.1 per cent up to 292 thousand.

Intake of new customers, growing usage of mobile data and premium TV content were driving revenue up. Over the year, comparing the six months’ period of 2020 with the same period in 2019:
- revenue from IT services grew by 24.4 per cent,
- revenue from TV services increased by 18.3 per cent,
- revenue from mobile services (excluding mobile devices’ insurance costs) went up by 6.1 per cent.

The latest report of the Communications Regulatory Authority of Lithuanian shows that we are regaining our market share on mobile communication segment while continue to be a leader on fixed broadband Internet and pay-TV markets.

On 16 June 2020, it was 20th anniversary of the Company’s listing on the Nasdaq Vilnius stock exchange. Through those years we persistently worked to create the value and ensure steady return to our shareholders. Including the record high dividends of EUR 0.09 per share for the year 2019, during the last 20 years the Company have paid in total EUR 754 million of dividends and in 2014 paid-out to the shareholders EUR 56.2 million due to capital reduction.