After a decade of contraction, Altice Portugal again registered an increase in revenues in 2019 with "historical results", with revenue reaching 2,100 million euros. After Anacom confirmed that MEO was the operator with the largest share of subscribers to bundled services, the company still guarantees that in the mobile business the number of prepaid customers grew by 122 thousand last year.
The data now released in a statement show that the goal of 5.3 million homes with fiber in Portugal in 2020 is getting closer and closer to being achieved. In 2019 there were 425 thousand new homes with this service, making a total of 4.9 million. In a year in which the company sold 49.99% of the optical fiber network and placed 2,315 million euros, it also reached the milestone of a million customers with fiber, installing 60% of the installed base.
The consumer segment (B2C) continues to grow at the level of the single customer base, with another two thousand in the fourth quarter of 2019 and, altogether, another 13 thousand. The area that includes services such as television, Internet or fiber accounted for revenue of 310 million in 2019 and, according to the company, the reason is related to the "offer of new products and services, bet on innovation, on fiber ethics and convergence ".
With regard to the TV service, Altice also reinforced its installed base in the consumer segment, with another 14 thousand net additions in the fourth quarter of 2019 and another 56 thousand over the past year. In the mobile business, the number of prepaid customers increased by 17 thousand in the last quarter of 2019 and 122 thousand during the year.
The data show that they are in line with the information released by Anacom last week, which shows that, at the end of 2019, MEO continues to be the operator with the largest share of bundled service subscribers, accumulating 40.4% of all subscribers of these services. With these data, the operator of the Altice group maintains the leadership it already had in 2018.
In 2019, Altice also guarantees that MEO was the only operator that managed to reduce the number of complaints, by 21%. In addition, it was the first time in 2019 that the operator had the least number of complaints per 1,000 customers, a result much better than that of all competitors, can be read in the statement.
As for the business services segment, which combines B2C, the wholesaler and the remaining business units of Altice Portugal, the company highlights the 2.8% growth compared to 2018, with the "excellent performance of Altice Labs" helping explain this increase. However, the wholesale segment was "impacted by adverse regulatory decisions", namely by the reduction in revenues from circuits and accesses as a result of the disconnections following the replacement by the other operators of the leased infrastructure Altice Portugal for installation / construction of their own infrastructure.
More recently, in February 2020, Altice acquired the majority stake in Blueticket, and, at a time when COVID-19 has had a major impact on the lives of the Portuguese, the company decided to make its contribution. Together with the operators NOS and Vodafone, MEO is offering 10 GB of mobile Internet.
