Telecom and media group Iliad’s French subsidiary, Free, added nearly 1.6 million mobile subscribers in 2015. Four years after launch, Free has nearly 12 million mobile customers, giving it a 17 percent market share. This includes 3.7 million LTE customers. Fixed broadband additions reached 270,000 in 2015, for an estimated 29 percent market share.
Iliad posted a record EUR 4.4 billion of revenue last year, with service revenue up 7.4 (or up 5.9 percent including handsets). Free Mobile’s service revenue rose by almost 20 percent, and total mobile revenues were up 13.3 percent to EUR 1.8 billion. The average monthly data use was 3.2 GB per LTE subscriber, up almost 80 percent in a year.
Landline revenue grew 1 percent to EUR 2.6 billion while ARPU was stable at EUR 34.50 a month. EBITDA improved 16 percent to EUR 1.5 billion and the EBITDA margin grew by 3 percentage points to EUR 33.8 percent mainly because Free carried more traffic over its own networks.
Iliad's capital expenditure reached EUR 1.22 billion in 2015, up on EUR 968 million a year earlier. Net profit increased 20 percent to EUR 335 million.
Free’s FttH network now passes nearly 2.5 million premises and the company has over 5,600 LTE sites. In 2015, Free acquired 10 MHz of additional spectrum in the 700 MHz band and 15 MHz of 1,800 MHz airwaves, which it will have to pay for in four instalments by 2018. Iliad also increased its LTE coverage to 63 percent of the population at the end of last year, compared to about 40 percent in December 2014.
