America Movil's Q3 profit slides 39% to $754M

América Móvil reported that its net profit dropped 38 percent year-over-year to $754 million, falling short of analyst expectations due to an increase in taxes and weak results at its European holdings Telekom Austria and KPN.

However, revenues rose 13.7 percent year-over-year to $16.3 million, reflecting what it said was the consolidation of its financial results of Telekom Austria from July 1. America Movil's EBITDA rose only 0.4 percent to $5.1 million, hurt by negative currency effects. 

Driven by growth in mobile data and pay-TV, service revenues rose 3.8 percent to $14.6 million, while hardware revenues rose 6.2 percent to $1.64 million. Mobile data and pay-TV each grew revenues around 15 percent.

In the wireline segment, América Móvil had 77.6 million fixed revenue generating units (RGUs) as of the end of September. The service provider said that this figure includes 4.4 million RGUs of Telekom Austria and 1.4 million new accesses obtained in the quarter. Out of this figure, 570,000 correspond to PayTV units, 439,000 to broadband accesses and 348,000 to landlines. In Latin America fixed RGUs were up 7.2 percent over the prior year with PayTV accesses rising 12.5 percent.

Similar to earlier quarters, Brazil led América Móvil's fixed RGU growth. During the quarter, Brazil's RGUs rose 11.6 percent year-over-year to 35.6 million accesses at the end of September, driven by PayTV and broadband accesses that expanded at rate of around 13 percent

América Móvil also saw gains in Mexico, where its broadband base increased 3.2 percent. Mexico now represents 28.7 percent of its total RGUs. Meanwhile, Central America and the Caribbean contribute almost 9 percent of its wireline clients, Co­lombia 7 percent, and Austria and Central and Eastern Europe 5.5 percent.

For more:
- see the earnings release (.pdf)

Special report: Wireline telecom earnings in the third quarter of 2014

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