Regional telecoms overview: Eastern Europe

Regional telecoms overview: Eastern Europe

With low disposable income and low penetration rates for fixed and broadband services, the Eastern European markets pose a challenging environment for telcos. Mobile revenues have gone some way to offsetting declining fixed voice revenues and despite launching innovative broadband services and bundles, operators are struggling to achieve the customer numbers needed to encourage top-line growth. This report provides an overview of the key financial and operational developments of Eastern European operators, which benchmarks their performance against each other for 2007.

Table of contents

Executive summary

In a nutshell
Key messages

Market overview

Scope of research
Economic and demographic overview
Key players and shareholders
Mobile market saturated
FMS beginning to slow
Broadband is providing significant growth…
…but still failing to offset the decline in fixed revenues
Total revenue growth slows further
Focus on costs and efficiency continues
Increased capex growth
Declining profitability a major concern
Debt under control

Table of figures

Table 1 Summary of key economic and demographic indicators: 2006
Table 2 Key players in Eastern Europe and their ownership structure: 2008
Figure 1 Mobile growth and penetration
Figure 2 Proportion of mobile subscribers as a percentage of total connections: 2006 and 2007
Figure 3 Change in fixed lines: 2007–06
Table 3 Bundled offerings available from operators: June 2008
Figure 4 Broadband lines
Figure 5 Change in domestic fixed revenues: 2007–06
Figure 6 Change in total revenues: 2007–06
Figure 7 Employee change: 2007–06
Figure 8 Revenues per employee (€000s)
Figure 9 EBITDA margins
Figure 10 Capex change: 2007–06
Figure 11 Capex as a percentage of revenues
Figure 12 EBIT margins
Figure 13 Net income margins
Figure 14 Cash efficiency
Figure 15 Debt/revenues ratio