LONDON (Alliance News) - FTSE 100-listed telecommunications firm BT Group PLC held its full-year forecasts Thursday after nine-month profit rose despite revenue continuing to fall in a "tough market."
For the nine months ended December, pretax profit grew 20% to GBP2.09 billion from GBP1.74 billion a year prior. Revenue fell 1.1% to GBP17.56 billion from GBP17.76 billion a year before.
During the period, only its Consumer division - which includes its mobile network EE - saw revenue growth with adjusted revenue up 3.2% to GBP8.06 billion. In contrast, its Enterprise unit saw revenue fall 4.9% to GBP4.73 billion, Global Services down 6.4% to GBP3.53 billion and Openreach 4.1% lower to GBP3.80 billion.
"We have continued to deliver consistently against our strategic objectives in a tough market, resulting in another sound quarter of operational and financial performance," outgoing BT Chief Executive Officer Gavin Patterson said.
In October 2018, BT announced that Worldpay Inc Co-CEO Philip Jansen will replace Patterson at the end of January 2019.
"In Consumer we launched the next version of our converged consumer offering, BT Plus with Complete Wi-Fi," Patterson explained. "Following successful trials in London we announced our plan to launch 5G in 16 UK cities in 2019."
"Openreach accelerated its fibre-to-the-premises commissioning and has now passed 890,000 premises," Patterson added. "We are ready to expand our FTTP programme up to and beyond 10 million premises if the conditions are right."
"Our overall outlook for the full year remains unchanged, with Ebitda around the top end of our guidance for FY 2018/19," Patterson said. "We continue to expect regulation, market dynamics, cost inflation and legacy product declines to impact in the short term before being more than offset by improved trading and cost transformation by our 2020/21 financial year."
BT kept its forecasts for the financial year ending March 2019 unchanged from those delivered in November. The former state monopoly expects earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation to be at the "top end" of its GBP7.3 billion to GBP7.4 billion range.
For the year ended March 2018, BT generated adjusted Ebitda of GBP7.65 billion on revenue of GBP23.72 billion. Pretax profit was GBP2.62 billion.
Overall, BT expects underlying revenue for the year ending March 2019 to dip 2% for the full year. Cash flow is anticipated between GBP2.3 billion and GBP2.5 billion with capital expenditure around the GBP3.7 billion mark.
"I am handing over the business with good momentum behind its ongoing transformation programme and wish my colleagues all the best for the future," Patterson concluded.
BT (BT.A)