April 30 (SeeNews) - Croatia's biggest telecoms operator, Hrvatski Telekom [ZSE:HT-R-A], said on Thursday its consolidated net profit fell 24% on the year to 151 million kuna ($22.1 million/19.9 million euro) in the first quarter of 2015.
Consolidated revenues edged up 0.7% on the year to 1.62 billion kuna through March, Hrvatski Telekom said in a statement.
Group CAPEX increased by 34.5% to 253 million kuna in the first quarter. The company said it plans to invest over 1.3 billion kuna this year, or over 25% more than it invested in 2014.
In the first quarter, focus was on a further development of the network infrastructure, increase of broadband access capacity and availability as well as IP transformation implementation to secure business continuity and long-term sustainability of market position, Hrvatski Telekom said.
The mobile subscribers of the telco's mobile arm, T-Mobile, were down 2.5% on the year to 2.21 million at the end of March with prepaid subscribers decreasing 5.6% to 1.12 million. Data subscribers rose 6.7% on the year to 1.4 million at the end of the quarter.
The mobile customer base decreased mainly as a result of aggressive competitive offers on the market and a decrease in customers with double SIM cards due to the continuing trend of favourable flat and cross net offers, the telco said.
By the end of 2015, Hrvatski Telekom plans to achieve 4G mobile network coverage in excess of 60% of the country's population. In the fixed network, 50% of households will have broadband access at bitrates of a minimum of 30 Mbp/s.
At the end of March, Hrvatski Telekom's 4G network reached 49% of Croatia's 4.3 million population and its 3G network has 77% population coverage.
At the end of the first quarter, the telco’s fixed broadband retail access lines were down 2.7% on the year to 607,000. The group’s TV customers, including IPTV, DTH and cable TV, edged down 0.6% on the year to 390,000 at the end of the first quarter.
Hrvatski Telekom is 51%-owned by Deutsche Telekom.
(1 euro=7.5757 Croatian kuna)