Hutchison Offers More Upbeat '3' News
After what would understatedly be referred to as a 'slow' start, Hutchison has released financials indicating that their UK '3' operation achieved monthly EBITDA breakeven in December last year. Now, bear in mind that the "BITDA" in EBITDA stands for Before Interst, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization, which often amount to substantial sums. However, this is still good news for the early 3G mover. Globally, '3's subscriber base has topped 8m subs, with 1.3 new adds in December alone (a big puchase period for mobile phones). While the 3 unit lost had losses of US$3.2m in 2004 (can that be right? that's pocket change for Li Ka Shing!) the unit is expected to become profitable late this year. Better financial returns are largely being driven by lowered Subscriber Acqusition Costs, and cheaper handsets. In the linked article, Hutchison's Li Ka Shing tries to cast this as '3' meeting goals on target, but that's a bit of revisionist history ignoring that the '3' goals have been "updated". Looking back, we've been quite hard on '3', but we'd rather see them be successful than revel in their failure. This is good news for Hutch, for 3G, and the industry in general.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: 3g
