Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC) published its financial results for the third quarter ending September 30, 2022. Revenues increased by 10.5% to AED 3.17 billion on sustained demand for broadband and mobile services. EBITDA grew 18.5% to AED 1.3 billion, thanks to a sharp increase in service revenues and gross margin expansion. Net profit increased by 12.7% to AED 319 million.
Financial summary
CEO Fahad Al Hassawi said: “This quarter’s results have been excellent on all fronts. Our business environment has clearly transitioned to a post-pandemic normality. We are benefiting from the UAE’s economic dynamism and healthy macro trends. Our results validate the efforts we deploy to provide new products and services, improve customer experience and execute our transformation journey. All these initiatives have laid the foundations of our commercial momentum.
“Our service revenues are recovering and growing at an encouraging pace; we generated service revenues in excess of AED 2 billion for a fifth consecutive quarter. Our profitability continued to improve on a sequential and year-on-year basis. We have invested and will continue to invest in our infrastructure to give our customers a simple and the best available experience in the UAE.”
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The mobile customer base grew 14.7% to 7.4 million subscribers, showing sustained performance in the postpaid segment with net additions of 32,000. The prepaid customer base of 6 million remained stable compared to the previous quarter. Moreover, the consumer broadband customer base increased 53.8% to 510,000.
Breaking down the revenues, mobile service revenues continued their recovery by surging 10.7% to AED 1.4 billion, while equipment sales generated revenues of AED 176 million. Fixed services revenues soared 22.2% to AED 892 million, buoyed by the continued strong performance of the consumer segment. In aggregate, service revenues increased 14.8% to AED 2.3 billion.
The increase in service revenues (and its inherent higher profitability) lifted EITC’s gross margin to 65.2% and the EBITDA margin expanded by 277bp to 41%.
