BT Group has published its financial results for the three months ended 30 June 2018, reporting a 2.1% drop in reported revenues to GBP5.72 billion (USD7.5 billion), while it noted that underlying revenue was down 2% as ‘regulated price reductions in Openreach and declines in [its] enterprise businesses offset growth in [its] consumer business’. In the three-month period under review, however, BT did see an increase in adjusted EBITDA, which rose by 1% on an annualised basis to GBP1.80 billion, mainly driven by stronger handset margins in the consumer business and restructuring related cost savings. Reported profit before tax for the first quarter of the operator’s 2019 fiscal year totalled GBP704 million, up from GBP418 million a year earlier, with profit after tax reaching GBP549 million (Q1 2018: GBP285 million). Reported capital expenditure for the three months was broadly flat, at GBP839 million.
Having adopted new key performance indicators (KPIs), meanwhile, BT notably opted not to release data on the number of consumer mobile or broadband subscribers it had at the end of the reporting period. It did, however, confirm that its ‘Business and Public Sector’ unit was serving 3.603 million mobile subscribers, up from 3.449 million at 30 June 2017, while the same unit had a total of 796,000 broadband lines in service, down from 817,000.
Notable instead was the release of information regarding the infrastructure presided over by network unit Openreach. BT confirmed that as at 30 June 2018 27.09 million premises were able to take up a superfast broadband service (i.e. 24Mbps or higher), while G.fast and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technologies were available to 1.12 million and 631,000 premises, respectively, at that date. Further, it was revealed that in terms of active accesses, there were 20.306 million broadband connections using the Openreach network at the end of the reporting period. Of that total, more than half – 10.40 million – were non-fibre-based, while 9.70 million were using fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) technology. Uptake for both FTTP and G.fast remained more limited, with such connections totalling 194,000 and 4,000, respectively.