Orange Talks Up Fibre Take-Up

Orange reported a 0.4% decline in revenues to 10.5 billion euros on an organic basis for the third quarter of 2021. Orange is now serving 10.8 million fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) customers out of 53.8 million connectable households. The FTTH client base rose 25.5% year on year, driven in particular by France and Poland.

Stéphane Richard, CEO of the Orange group, said: "In France, the good momentum continued with growth of 1.2 points in retail services. Orange fibre now has 5.6 million customers in France, an increase of 36% year on year. However, as yet our accounts reflect little of this promising trend owing to the decline in co-financing received from other operators on our fibre network in 2021 compared to 2020."

Orange said its operations in Africa and the Middle East continued to post very strong revenue growth, thanks to the performance of retail services. It said Orange Money, which is facing a tougher competitive environment, has an active customer base of 22.6 million, up 12.5% over one year. "Fixed broadband [in Africa and the Middle East} also continued to have excellent momentum, with a customer base that has increased 23.4% year on year," Orange added. "Likewise, B2B services posted spectacular growth, even though this still only contributes slightly to total revenues." 

Having bought out partner Groupama, Orange now own 100% of Orange Bank, which is serving 1.6 million customers. Orange Bank Africa now has 600,000 customers in Ivory Coast. On a conference call with financial analysts, Paul de Leusse, CEO of Orange Bank, said: "Our loan origination will be beyond 850 million euros [in 2021] compared to less than 500 million euros last year. And our NBI, which is our revenues, is growing by 37% since last year, which -- and obviously, our losses are reducing quite quickly as well."

"We prefer to partner with fintechs because we find there that we have more, let's say, off-the-shelf solution, which we can implement. That's why we have made the acquisition of Anytime. That's why we signed a partnership with Younited, which is a leading French fintech on consumer loan. That's why also we are discussing with several insurtechs to do the same as we did with Younited. And obviously, these fintechs are much more efficient to providers with some digital solution compared to traditional banks." 

Source: Orange statements and Seeking Alpha transcript

Domestic Mobile Drags Down Telecom Italia

Telecom Italia reported a 2.1% year-on-year decline in revenues to 3.8 billion euros on an organic basis for the third quarter of 2021. Domestic mobile revenues were down 4.5%, but revenues in Brazil rose 2.8% to 731 million euros.

Still, Telecom Italia said group service revenues fell just 1.4% in the third quarter on an organic basis, compared with 1.7% in the second quarter and 2.5% in the first quarter.

The group also said growth in revenues "related to innovative 'beyond connectivity' services continues, with the cloud showing a record increase (+ 25% year-on-year in the quarter) and total ICT revenues up 13.3% despite some projects being postponed to the fourth quarter." source: Telecom Italia statement

Elevated Online Activity Lifts Google

Alphabet (the parent of Google) reported a 39% year-on-year rise in revenues at constant currencies to  65.1 billion U.S. dollars. Ruth Porat, CFO Alphabet and Google, said: "Our revenue performance in the third quarter reflects continued broad-based strength in advertiser spend and elevated consumer online activity as well as a strong contribution from Google Cloud." Source: Google collateral

Surge in iPhone Sales for Apple

Apple reported a 29% year-on-year rise in sales for the quarter ending September 25th to 83.4 billion US dollars. Sales of iPhones leapt 47% to 38.9 billion US dollars, while services revenue climbed 26% to 18.3 billion dollars.

Luca Maestri, Apple's CFO, said the company "experienced better-than-expected demand for our products despite supply constraints that we estimated at around 6 billion dollars." He added that "paid subscriptions continue to show very strong growth. We now have more than 745 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, which is up more than 160 million from last year, and nearly five times the number of paid subscriptions we had less than five years ago."

Although Maestri cautioned the impact from supply constraints will be larger during the December quarter, Apple expects to "achieve very solid year-over-year revenue growth and to set a new revenue record during the September to December quarter. We expect revenue for each product category to grow on a year-over-year basis, except for iPad, which we expect to decline year over year due to supply constraints. For services, we expect our growth rate to decelerate from the September quarter but to remain strong." Sources: Apple statements and Motley Fool transcript