Three’s revenues rose by 2% during the first quarter of 2021 as the company continues to overhaul its network and leadership strategy alongside the rollout of 5G.
Total revenues reached £581 million despite a decrease in active customers from 10 million to 9.3 million. Three classifies an active customer as one that has used the network in the past 90 days and attributed the decline to lower demand for pay-as-you-go services due to lockdown restrictions.
Indeed, the number of pay as you go subscribers fell by 6.5% year-on-year as people used their phones less or were tempted by cheaper offers from value-conscious MVNOs.
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Three 5G
Crucially, the number of contract customers rose from 7.24 million to 7.56 million, meaning Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) actually increased from £12.60 a month to £12.69 a month. Churn was also lower at 1.3%, with Three attributing this to strong retention initiatives.
“This is an encouraging set of results for the quarter,” said Robert Finnegan, CEO of both Three UK and Three Ireland. “Three UK has shown significant resilience and I’m really pleased to see the growth in some of our key business units and in our contract base. We continue to make good progress on our mission to provide better connectivity every day, for every Three UK customer.”
Like its competitors, Three is investing heavily in its 5G rollout and has so far connected 193 towns and cities. The deployment forms part of Three’s £2 billion investment in its network and IT infrastructure, a programme which has seen the company migrate to a cloud-based core network, acquire new fibre capabilities, and decentralise to a system of 20 regional data centres.
Three believes its contiguous spectrum holdings, particularly in the 3.4GHz band, present it with an opportunity to transform from the smallest player into the market to a potential leader.
Meanwhile there have been significant changes at a leadership level, with Finnegan adding the UK to his remit as Three Ireland CEO early last year. Since then, there have been several new appointments, the most recent of which was Jon Davies as Director of Digital earlier this week.
“Just a few weeks ago, we won two 10MHz blocks of low frequency spectrum at the auction, tripling the amount of low frequency spectrum we own. It will have a transformative effect on our customers’ experience. Coupled with our existing low frequency spectrum and the UK’s largest 5G spectrum holding, we are in a fantastic position to deliver a great network experience for our customers.
“I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at Three for their hard work in what have been challenging circumstances. I’m very excited about what’s next for us as the high street and our stores begin to reopen and restrictions continue to ease across the UK.”
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