KPN sees TV base grow

Dutch telco KPN saw its IPTV base grow by 12% to 1.963 million in the year to June, more than offsetting an ongoing decline in digital-terrestrial TV customers to give it a total TV base of 2.315 million, up 6.3%.

KPN’s ‘other’ TV customers, principally its Digitenne DTT service, declined by 17% to 352,000 over the same period.

KPN added 33,000 IPTV customers in the second quarter, compared with 15,000 broadband net additions.

Triple-play net additions were 24,000, taking triple-play penetration to 59%.

Fixed-mobile bundles now represent 38% of the operator’s post-paid mobile base.

The quarter saw KPN launch a 4K TV trial, in addition to a broader set of TV channels and full HD as part of its OTT TV service.

Overall, KPN posted revenues of €1.676 billion for the quarter, down 3.7%, and adjusted EBITDA of €592 million, down 1.7%.

“The execution of our strategy ‘Simplify, Grow, Innovate’ we presented in March is firmly on track. In the second quarter of 2016 we again saw strong growth of our bundled services, delivered over our best-in-class networks and supported by continued product innovations. We launched a 4K TV pilot in the Consumer market and introduced our managed hybrid cloud proposition in the business market. Furthermore, we concluded several important multi-year agreements with major business customers, illustrating our growth in the IT market,” said CEO Eelco Blok.

“In the first half of this year we completed the migration of the majority of our Consumer customers to a new integrated order management IT platform, which is an important milestone in our Simplification programme. Together with the execution of other parts of the program and strong commercial progress, this is expected to support our financial performance in the second half of this year.”