During the first quarter of 2018, the synergy of services and activities helped Telia Lietuva, which was named The Company of the Century by the association Investors' Forum, to attract more clients, while their increasing use of the company's services caused a 6.9 per cent increase in the company's revenue, which amounted to EUR 90.7 million. In addition to the growing demand for mobile communications and smart TV services as well as continuously increasing sales of equipment, the company records increasing income from IT services.

The company's EBITDA, not including non-recurring items, amounted to EUR 31 million for the first quarter of 2018, an increase by 8.6 per cent over the year. Free cash flows during the comparable period almost doubled and amounted to EUR 5.4 million.*

'Over the course of the year when we have been providing all services under the Telia brand, we have broken the ice on the market. We are a telecommunications company that invests the most into network expansion in Lithuania. We offer a wide selection of innovative services and we do not intend to stop in the future. The increasing popularity of services and good financial results confirm that we have found a key to clients' hearts,' says Kęstutis Šliužas, CEO of Telia Lietuva.

During the first quarter of this year, the number of Telia Lietuva clients increased in all categories of the main services: the number of users of post-paid mobile telecommunications increased by 3.6 per cent and amounted to 1.093 million, the number of smart TV (IPTV) users increased by 10.3 per cent to 215 thousand, while the number of fibre-optic Internet users increased by 6.8 per cent and stood at 268 thousand.

'The synergy of services and solutions in our activities continues to generate positive effects. It is obvious that customers see real benefits and appreciate the convenience of receiving all necessary mobile communications, internet, TV and high-quality content services from a single source. The popularity of 'Telia One' offer confirms this. To date, more than 15 thousand customers have chosen this unique converged offer, which offers higher Internet speed as well as more mobile data and TV content. And their number continues to grow,' says K. Šliužas.

Like during the previous quarters, customers' migration between services provided by Telia Lietuva continues as current older generation services are replaced by more advanced ones. During the first quarter of 2018, as soon as 'Super VDSL' technology, which allows Internet speeds up to 250 Mbps via copper lines, was presented, over two thousand customers started using it. Previously, most of them used broadband DSL internet connections. The number of users of digital terrestrial TV (DVB-T) service continues to decrease as they choose smart Telia TV. The number of viewers of the latter increased by 4.7 thousand during the aforementioned period.

During the first quarter of 2018, in comparison with the same period of 2017, the total number of mobile users increased by 17 thousand. At the beginning of the year, over 90 per cent of all Telia Lietuva mobile data were sent via 4G.

During January-March, the highest increase in Telia Lietuva revenue in terms of services was recorded from equipment sales (22.3%), mobile communications (11%), television (7.7%) and IT services (7.8%). The recovery of the latter services was caused by increased business needs, particularly for data centres, cloud computing and computerized work places maintenance services. In addition, at the beginning of the year Telia Lietuva obtained a certificate of the software manufacturer SAP, which allows Telia Lietuva to perform maintenance of IT systems of the largest companies. Having become the first IT company in the Baltic states to obtain such certification, Telia Lietuva strengthened the business to business segment of services.

During the first three months of 2018, Telia Lietuva allocated EUR 13.6 million in total to investments, i.e. 5.4 per cent more than a year ago. A major part of investments, EUR 10.3 million in total, was allocated for the expansion of fibre-optic Internet infrastructure and mobile network capacities. The rest of the investments were allocated to the improvement of the company's IT systems by implementation of a common customer care and business management system.

Taking into consideration the results achieved during last year due to combination of fixed and mobile businesses, the Board of Telia Lietuva proposed to pay for the year 2017 the largest dividends in five years: EUR 0.07 per share. Value created by the merger of companies increased the market capitalisation of the company - over the year, the market capitalization of the company increased by more than EUR 100 million and amounted to EUR 670 million.

Note: *Financial data of 2017 were recalculated due to International Financial Reporting Standard 15 that came into force on 1 January 2018; therefore, they are slightly different from the data that were reported a year ago.

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Telia Lietuva AB published this content on 20 April 2018 and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 20 April 2018 05:11:00 UTC