As of the beginning of 2010, Telefónica was serving 265 million accesses worldwide (+5.1%) thanks to the expansion of the mobile business (+7.4%), fixed broadband (+8.2%) and pay TV (+9.8%). Net adds in the mobile telephony business grew by multiples in all regions in the second half while the mobile broadband business reached 15 million accesses at year end compared to 9 million a year earlier.
By region, the growth rates reported by Telefónica Europa were 6.9% year-on-year, while and Telefónica Latinoamérica grew by 6.5% year-on-year.
For 2009, Telefónica met all its financial guidance despite the global economic conditions. In absolute terms, Telefónica Latinoamérica contributed 40.5% to total Group revenues (+1.8 percentage points compared to 2008, excluding the impact from hyperinflation accounting), whilst Telefónica España and Telefónica Europe contributed 34.7% and 23.9% to Group revenue respectively.
Operating income before depreciation and amortisation (OIBDA), which totaled 22,603 million euros in 2009 (-1.4% in reported terms). In organic terms, OIBDA grew 0.9% year-on-year, underpinned by Telefónica Latinoamérica (+3.8 percentage points) and Telefónica Europa (+0.7 percentage points), which offset Telefónica España's lower
contribution (-3.3 percentage points).
Some highlights from the report:
- By type of access, the Telefónica Group had over 202 million wireless accesses at the
end of 2009. - The main drivers of wireless net adds to December 2009 were Brazil (6.8 million), Mexico (2.1 million), Germany (1.5 million), Argentina (1.1 million) and UK (1 million). The main contributors in the fourth quarter were Brazil (2.9 million), Mexico (0.9 million), Argentina (0.5 million) and Germany (0.6 million).
- In Spain nearly 88% of retail broadband accesses are bundled as part of some kind of dual or triple play package, whilst in Latin America almost 56% of broadband accesses are bundled as part of Duos or Trios. In 2009 net adds exceeded 1.0 million accesses (0.3 million in the fourth quarter), mostly from Argentina and UK.
- Pay TV accesses stood at around 2.5 million at the end of 2009, 9.8% up from a year earlier. It is worth mentioning that the Company already offers Pay-TV services in Spain, the Czech Republic, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina.
- CAPEX for 2010 is expected to be in the range of EUR 7,450 t0 7,650 million. For comparison, CapEx in 2009 reached EUR 7,257 million.
- In 2009, Spanish wireline access market continued affected by an adverse economic climate, and showed an estimated year-on-year decrease of 0.8%. Against this backdrop, the company's total number of wireline accesses in service (retail wireline telephony accesses, wholesale line rental, fully unbundled loops, and nked wholesale ADSL) was down 2.4% in 2009 (-386,465 wireline accesses in the year).
- In wireless telephony, estimated market penetration in Latin America stood at 90%, an increase of 8 percentage points from December 2008. Telefónica managed 134.7 million wireless accesses in the region, yielding year-on-year growth of 9.2% after reporting net adds of 11.4 million accesses in the full year.
- The number of broadband accesses in Latin America for the company exceeded 6.4 million, and is still recording
significant growth rates (+5.9% year-on-year) as a result of solid growth in Argentina (+14.4% year-on-year), Peru (+10.0% year-on-year) and Chile (+9.3% year-on-year). Pay TV customers reached 1.6 million (up 7% year-on-year), with 179,556 accesses added since the start of the year. Wireline accesses remained affected by fixed-mobile substitution and fell by 4.2% on 2008.
