Tencent Racks Up Rapid Growth

Tencent reported a 61% year-on-year increase in revenues to 65.2 billion yuan (9.83 billion US dollars) for the third quarter. Chairman and CEO of Tencent, Ma Huateng, said: "We recorded strong business and revenue growth across multiple business lines including games, digital content, online advertising and payment-related services. In particular, our video platform gained audience and revenue market share, we believe it has become China’s top online video platform in terms of mobile daily active users and subscriptions. We believe this success reflects our increasing investment in self-commissioned video content, our improved selection of licensed video content, and our scheduling and audience management initiatives."

The group said that Tencent Video has exceeded 43 million fee-based subscriptions, adding: "We will continue to increase our investment in video content, especially self-commissioned video content, and to reinforce our content recommendation algorithms."

Tencent also reported that it now has 980 million monthly active users of the Weixin/WeChat messaging service, representing year-on-year growth of 15.8%. The service handles approximately 38 billion messages a day, representing year-on-year growth of 25%. Tencent added that there are now 3.5 million monthly active Official Accounts (business accounts) with monthly active followers of these accounts reaching 797 million in aggregate, representing year-on-year growth of 14% and 19% respectively.  source: Tencent statement

Europe Offsets India for Vodafone

Vodafone reported a 4.1% year-on-year fall in group revenue to 23.1 billion euros for the six months ending September 30th, blaming the deconsolidation of Vodafone Netherlands and currency movements.  That figure doesn't include Vodafone India, which is now merging with rival Idea Cellular.  Vodafone India's service revenues were down 15.8% over the six month period. Vodafone said that group service revenue rose 1.3% on an organic basis in the quarter ending September 30th (excluding Vodafone Netherlands and Vodafone India) driven primarily by "our growth engines of mobile data, fixed/convergence and enterprise."

Vittorio Colao, CEO, commented: "Revenue grew organically in the majority of our markets driven by mobile data and our continued success as Europe’s fastest growing broadband provider. Enterprise revenues continue to grow, led by our Internet of Things (‘IoT’), cloud and fixed services ... In India competition remains intense. There are however signs of positive developments in the Indian market, with consolidation of smaller operators and recent price increases from the new entrant. ...we will continue to implement our strategic initiatives, including fibre infrastructure expansion in Germany, Portugal and the UK; our entry into the consumer IoT market with the launch of “V by Vodafone”; and the ‘Digital Vodafone’ programme designed to enhance our customers’ experience, increasing revenues and cost efficiency.” source: Vodafone statement

Deutsche Telekom Maintains Some Momentum

Deutsche Telekom reported year-on-year organic growth of 3.3% for the third quarter to 18.3 billion euros on the back of an "unbroken broadband boom" in Germany and other "positive rends in Europe". In Germany, service revenue rose 0.5%, while service revenue in the US climbed 6.5% to 7.4 billion US dollars as T-Mobile US added another 1.3 million customers.

In Germany, DT added another 700,000 customers (retail and wholesale) for its fibre broadband service and 65,000 new customers for its Entertain proposition. Source: Deutsche Telekom presentation

• 
  

Apple Sees Another Surge in Services

Apple reported a 12% year-on-year increase in revenue for the quarter ending September 30th 2017 to 52.6 billion US dollars. iPhone sales rose 2%, while service revenue leapt 34% to 8.5 billion dollars.  Apple forecast revenue of between 84 billion and 87 billion dollars for the current quarter, which would represent a year-on-year increase of between 7% and 11% over the record 78.4 billion dollars it generated in revenue in the equivalent quarter last year. source: Apple statement