Pascale Paoli-Lebailly ©RapidTVNews | 02-09-2011

For the first half of 2011, French telco SFR’s revenues reached €6.12 billion, a 2% decrease compared to the first half of 2010.

The operator argues that in a highly competitive market, revenue was impacted by the implementation on 1 January 2011 of a VAT rise that it refused to pass on to its mobile phone clients.

Indeed excluding the new VAT standard and regulated price cut impacts, revenues increased by 2.7%.

Between November 16, 2010 and end August, 2011, the new NeufBox Evolution offer has attracted around 415,000 customers.

SFR’s EBITA was €1.241 billion, a 9.3% decrease compared to the first half of 2010 and a 6.4% decrease excluding €42 million of 2010 non-recurring items.

Overall mobile revenues decreased by 3.9% compared to the first half of 2010 to €4.2 billion with mobile service revenues decreasing by 5.1% to €4 billion.

For the first half of the year, SFR added 220,000 net new mobile post-paid subs and by the end of June 2011, 34% of customers were equipped with a smartphone out of a total mobile customer base reached 21.059 million.

Broadband Internet and fixed revenues were €2 billion, a 1.3% increase compared with the first half of 2010. At the end of June 2011, the broadband Internet residential customer base totalled 4.983 M, a 6.4% increase year-on-year.

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