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