Freenet AG: Revenue and earnings increase in the second quarter with good figures in the TV segment

Today, freenet AG has published their interim report for the second quarter of 2017 and confirmed the outlook.

In the second quarter the company generated a Group revenue of EUR 839.2 million with the segment 'TV and Media' at EUR 74.7 million (previous year: EUR 67.6 million) contributing to the quarterly revenue. Thus, in the first half of the current financial year, Group revenue increased to EUR 1,677.2 million (previous year: EUR 1,556.9 million).

Customer Ownership continues to grow for the 20th quarter in succession. The number of customers in the postpaid and no-frills sector increased by around 175,000 compared to the same quarter of the previous year, to now 9.59 million. The number of particularly valuable customers with a two-year contractual relationship included in this figure increased by 169,000 or 2.6 percent compared to previous year's level, to 6.56 million.

The gross profit increased considerably compared to the second quarter of 2016, essentially due to the contribution from the segment 'TV and Media' at EUR 231.6 million.

Group EBITDA could be increased slightly in the second quarter to EUR 108.4 million. The contribution of the segment 'TV and Media', newly created in the second quarter of 2016, amounted to EUR 10.5 million in the second quarter of 2017 (previous year: EUR 9.0 million). For the first six months of 2017, freenet AG generated a Group EBITDA of EUR 209.3 million, an increase of 8.1 %.

In early July 2017 MEDIA BROADCAST GmbH in Cologne and EXARING AG in Munich for the first time communicated customer numbers of the new segment 'TV and Media'. Accordingly, freenet AG was able to win more than 550,000 paying customers in the TV business by 30 June 2017. Of these, more than 500,000 DVB-T2 customers subscribed to the service of the now approximately 2 million households that meet the reception requirements for freenet TV. Due to a three-monthly free phase from the start of the sales of the TV product freenet TV, the freenet Group will not generate revenue from the private customer business of the MEDIA BROADCAST Group1 before the third quarter of 2017. The IPTV product waipu.tv has recorded over 250,000 registered users since its launch. Thereof, over 50,000 households have chosen one of the payment packages for this product.

'The sales targets for the products of the segment 'TV and Media' for the first half of 2017 were very ambitious and yet we have achieved them. This encourages us to adhere to the equally ambitious 2017 annual guidance of more than 900,000 paying TV users - and I am very confident that we will achieve this goal, too,' says Christoph Vilanek, CEO of freenet AG.