Danish incumbent TDC has announced its results for 1Q2007. Year-on-year, revenue was down 1.1% to DKK11.4 billion (USD2.1 billion), while EBITDA fell by 3.6% in the same period to DKK3.2 billion and net income dropped 27.3% to DKK806 million. The company attributed to figures to the general pressure of competition, an increase in costs for cable fault correction, the divestment of the Baltic mobile business Bitë in February 2007, and a negative development in the exchange rate in relation to TDC Switzerland. When adjusted for acquisition and divestment of businesses, TDC’s revenue increased by 0.7%.
’We are in a market with hardly any growth and at the same time prices continuously go down. That puts pressure on earnings and emphasizes the importance for us to focus on improving the efficiency of our business and reducing our costs so we can achieve satisfactory results in the future,’ said President and CEO Jens Alder.
Meanwhile, the firm’s cellular arm TDC Mobil is now ready to upgrade its 3G network with high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) technology, it said in a press release. Copenhagen and Odense, as well as large cities on Zealand, Funen, and in southern Denmark will gain access to the ‘Turbo 3G’ service at the end of 2007. Aarhus, Aalborg, and all other major cities are expected to be ready for Turbo 3G at the end of the first quarter of 2008, by which time 64% of the population will be covered. Currently, the top download speed on the operator’s W-CDMA network is 384kbps, but with the HSDPA upgrade customers will be able to enjoy theoretical maximums of 3Mbps in the centres of Copenhagen, Odense, Aarhus, and Aalborg, and up to 1.5Mbps elsewhere.