LATAM cable only bright spot for Millicom
Details
Juan Fernandez Gonzalez
| 09 February 2017

Millicom’s revenues were down globally during 2016, while its Latin American cable operation was one of the few positive results for the telco.

According to the company’s the Q4 results and annual report, annual revenues were down by 4.9% in 2016, from $6.57 billion in 2015 to $6.25 billion. In addition, the company’s annual gross profit went down by 3.9% as did the organic profit (down 9.8%).

Such losses were mostly motivated by currency fluctuations, as revenues in local currencies were only down by 0.4%. However, mobile subscriber losses have also been reported in Latin America, the largest revenue generator for Millicom, invoicing $5.35 billion during last year.

However, Millicom’s cable and fibre operations showed great performance during the year. The telco’s HFC network passed seven million homes, growing by 12.2%, while cable reached 3.69 million subscribers (up 13.9%).

“In the fourth quarter, we significantly accelerated the rollout of our HFC network, passing 304,000 new homes, almost double the rollout run rate achieved during the previous three quarters,” said the report.

“Market penetration also remained strong and we ended the year with almost 3.7 million HFC RGUs, almost 14% higher than at the end of 2015, with the proportion of our customers taking double and triple-play services, increasing our total base to 59%, up from 56% at the end of the previous year.”

These positive cable and HFC figures were not enough to counteract losses in LATAM however, as total revenue in the region declined by 3.4% in the quarter and by 2.3% in the year.

“Looking ahead to 2017, we aim to accelerate further the implementation of our strategy in Latin America, targeting to rollout state-of-the-art fibre to more than one million additional homes in the year, and to add more than three million new 4G mobile data customers,” said Mauricio Ramos, CEO, Millicom.