Orange Belgium : confirms its commercial success as a Bold Challenger

Orange Belgium reiterates its financial guidance for 2018, pointing to a slight revenue growth and an adjusted EBITDA between 275 and 295 million euros under IFRS 15 accounting rules. The Orange Belgium Group expects its 2018 core investment (excluding all cable related investments) to remain stable compared to 2017.

Michaël Trabbia, Orange Belgium's Chief Executive Officer, commented:

'In the first half of 2018, in line with our Bold Challenger positioning, we demonstrated our ability to shake off the market's status quo to the benefit of our customers. The recent introduction of our Koala tariff plan, aimed at offering unlimited calls as well as a decent bucket of mobile data to most of the customers, and the earlier launch of the first fully unlimited mobile offer in Belgium, both supported by our leading 4G network, convinced more and more customers to choose Orange. Thanks to these disruptive offers we are strongly accelerating the data usage growth of our customers.

Regarding convergence, we continued to improve our processes efficiency, and our 'Love' offers, with the introduction of Mobile Live TV at no extra cost and of a Fixed Phone option. Moreover, the recent final decision of the regulators regarding the Broadband and TV market analysis marked an important step towards a sustainable internet and TV offer with an improved quality of service and installation process. It will also allow us over time to address the untapped market for Internet-only offers.

Finally, we entered into a very promising partnership with Medialaan, the leading Flemish broadcaster, which includes a full MVNO agreement starting as from spring 2019.'

Arnaud Castille, Chief Financial Officer, stated:

'Our commercial results and underlying financial results mark a strong first half of the year 2018. This demonstrates our focus on increasing our mobile contract and convergent customer base. It is also proof that we are capable of improving efficiency of our cable business, while driving innovation, digitalization and enhancing the overall customer experience. Nevertheless, this semester's year-on-year comparison was still impacted by the EU Roam-Like-at-Home regulation and the decline of MVNO revenues. In the second half of the year our underlying growth should be more visible as the gross EU roaming impact will be very limited and could even be compensated by the price-volume elasticity. In addition, the year-on-year evolution of the MVNO revenues should be relatively flat in the second semester of 2018.

We achieved two other important milestones: firstly we signed a 5-year wholesale partnership with Medialaan, the leading Flemish commercial broadcaster. As from spring 2019, Medialaan will transfer approximately 365,000 customers, currently hosted on the Base network, to our leading 4G network. Secondly, the Belgian regulator's decision for the TV and broadband market should allow us to benefit from more sustainable wholesale conditions. This should improve cable profitability and decrease churn even further. Since inception, cable churn rate reached its lowest level in the second quarter of 2018.'