During an earnings call with analysts, CEO Daniel Hajj said: “We just launched our 5G network in Austria, we are going to the same thing all around Latin America.” Adding that in H2 of 2020, the company would start to put in place the things needed to deliver 5G, depending on where it has the spectrum to enable it.
‘On January 27th, we officially launched our first 5G network in Austria. We developed a top of the line 5G platform with the broadest coverage in the country by a wide margin. Our “5Giga” premium tariff portfolio for mobile and Internet@ Home segments features unlimited data usage, network priority to guarantee bandwidth and speeds, premium customer care and the latest devices’, said the company in its 2019 financial and operating report.
“But I think we can have some countries at the end of the year also, in Latin America,” said Hajj. The company has forecast, capital expenditure for the year, so exceed no more than $8.5 billion in line with what its spent last year, despite its ambitious 5G plans.
For the fourth quarter of 2019, the company reported revenues of 263 billion pesos, which were the same as Q4 of 2018.
Service revenues increased to 3.2% from 2.5% in the previous quarter with those on the mobile platform growing 5.7% year-over-year. EBITA totalled 81.7% pesos in Q4 , while operating profit came in at 44.6 billion pesos and financing costs at 8 billion pesos resulting in a net profit of 21.2 billion for the quarter up 63.4% year-on-year.
Acquisitions came in 24.9 billion pesos, most of which accounted for the company’s $950m Nextel Brazil acquisition that was completed at the end of 2019.
