2degrees Delivers Record Results In 2020

· Record year for service revenue and underlying earnings from operations

· Growth reported across mobile and broadband offerings

· Mobile network reaches 98.5% of the places Kiwis live and work, with almost 1800 sites.

· More than $1b invested in full-service mobile and broadband offering since 2009.

2degrees has once again demonstrated its ability to deliver strong growth in the New Zealand telco market, despite a year fraught with the challenges, uncertainty and impacts presented by a global pandemic.

The company has delivered service revenue of $545m (+7.4%) and underlying earnings from operations totalling $180m (+6.5%)[1] for the year ended 31 December 2020, according to financial results filed today.

CEO Mark Aue commented: “This is a great achievement and a credit to our team’s hard work. Service revenues are a vital measure of our performance and this year’s record of $545m reflects growth in the consumer and business market share across all our mobile and broadband offerings.

“When faced with the uncertainty of 2020 we made bold, difficult but necessary decisions to ensure we delivered for our customers, enabling our business to come through the year in the strongest position possible for future growth. In doing so, we demonstrated our agility and our operational capabilities to scale the business and continue to invest where we saw strategic growth opportunities.”

Underlying Earnings from Operations were up 6.5% from $169m in 2019, which Mr Aue highlighted as notable, given the absence of high-margin international roaming revenue due to border closures.

“Today’s results show that 2degrees continued to growth strongly in 2020 in mobile and broadband, and for the consumer and business markets. We’ve invested more than $1 billion into our network and have won accolades for the quality of service we are offering our customers. For example, it was recently rated first for ‘most responsive network’ and first equal for its ‘excellent consistent quality’ by Tutela,” Mr Aue said. [2]

2degrees also made strong inroads into the business market, where it now serves more than 106,000 mobile corporate customers, an increase of 20.5%. In the consumer market, the number of Mobile Pay Monthly subscribers grew to more than 400,000, an increase of 3.9% YOY; and the number of broadband subscribers rose 13%, with 2degrees now providing broadband to 115,000 homes.

“We are proud of the growth we have seen in key segments and we now boast more than 1.6m customers, which is a fantastic performance from a business that’s just 11 years old. The exciting thing for our team is that we are now entering our next growth phase, including our newly minted partnership with the globally recognised market leader in mobile networks, Ericsson, for our exciting 5G rollout.”

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