Soon refocused on telecoms only, if the sale of BFM-TV to CMA CGM concludes as planned in mid-2024, Altice France will be able to concentrate fully on the recovery of SFR. Patrick Drahi’s telecoms operator really needs it, after a particularly difficult year 2023. It lost 231,000 mobile subscribers in the last quarter of 2023 alone, according to figures announced Wednesday March 20. In one year, the loss exceeds half a million customers, out of a total of 20.4 million. In fixed lines, the annual drop amounts to 158,000 subscribers, the increase in the number of optical fiber customers not compensating for the erosion of ADSL.
As a result, SFR’s turnover fell by 1.3% in 2023 (to 10.8 billion euros), and gross operating income (Ebitda) fell by 4.5% (to 3. 8 billion). And 2024 is looking bad: the operator expects a further decline in its revenues and a drop of around 5%, or even more, in its Ebitda. With these poor results, net debt has increased further, to just over 24.3 billion euros at the end of 2023, or 6.4 times annual Ebitda.
SFR is therefore not benefiting from the policy of price increases initiated in 2022, after several quarters of ultra-aggressive promotions which had cost it very dearly. The deterioration of their purchasing power makes consumers a little more sensitive to the prices of their telecom subscriptions. And this context has revived competition between operators at the end of 2023.
“Tensions on purchasing power”
Bouygues Telecom observed the same phenomenon. Last year, despite price increases, the operator’s average revenue per mobile subscriber remained stable at 19.70 euros per month in 2023, “due to a migration of customers towards more economical packages, reflecting tensions on purchasing power”explained the subsidiary of the Bouygues group on February 27.
At Orange, after a peak in the middle of the year, the average revenue per mobile subscriber subsequently fell slightly, to 19 euros at the end of 2023, but it remains 30 cents higher than a year earlier. Just like at Free (the operator of Xavier Niel, individual shareholder of World), where the prices of packages have been frozen: the average bill fell in the last quarter of 2023 (to 12.10 euros) but, over one year, it increased by 30 cents.
To respond to the financial concerns caused by the arrest in Portugal of his partner, Armando Pereira, for alleged acts of corruption and tax evasion, Patrick Drahi said he was ready, in August 2023, to sell part of the capital of his French telecoms operator, in order to drastically reduce Altice France’s debt.
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