Stockholm-based Tele2 Group has announced a 1% year-on-year rise in net sales for the second quarter to 30 June 2016, to SEK6.668 billion (USD808 million), though EBITDA dropped 22% to SEK1.087 billion. Net income plummeted from a profit of SEK309 million in Q2 2015 to a loss of SEK60 million in the most recent period, with the fall attributed partly to increased spending in the Netherlands, where Tele2 is in the process of deploying a 4G LTE mobile network, and also to lower EBITDA in Sweden, which was negatively impacted by an increased sales and marketing spend and non-recurring items.
In operational terms, the firm added a net 165,000 new customers in the second quarter, though this was well down on the 540,000 users added in the same period a year earlier. The addition of 196,000 net new mobile users – mainly in the Netherlands and Kazakhstan – was offset by subscriber losses for its broadband (down by 5,000) and fixed telephony (down by 26,000) businesses. Tele2 claimed 16.38 million customers across its operations in Sweden, the Netherlands, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Austria, Croatia and Kazakhstan at the end of June 2016.