VEON, A Global Provider Of Connectivity &Digital Services, Will Release Its Results For Fourth Quarter Ended 31 December 2020 On 18 Feb 2021.
VEON, A Global Provider Of Connectivity And Digital Services, Will Release Its Results For The Fourth Quarter Ended 31 December 2020 On 18 February 2021. Ahead of the day we wanted to provide you with some background on the company, as well as a quick recap of the past year.
VEON has over 200 million customers across nine markets, spanning three continents. It is one of the world’s largest mobile operators, with network coverage almost 10% of the world’s population. It is committed to expanding its mobile network infrastructure and accelerating the introduction of locally relevant digital services to improve access and engagement for all.
2020 9 month performance
The Group started the year with a balanced performance, with good underlying performances from Ukraine, Pakistan and Kazakhstan in particular while Russia faced some operational challenges. Lockdown restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic saw both operational and financial strain on the industry as a whole and for VEON, impacting Group performance in Q2 and causing organic revenue and EBITDA to contract by 6.9% and 7.7% year-over-year in local currency terms respectively.
As restrictions eased, Q3 saw strong sequential improvements in the financial performance of the majority of the Group’s operating companies and a normalization in Group revenues and EBITDA. All operations recorded improved trends YoY compared to Q2 and mobile data revenue was particularly strong with double digit growth, +13.1% YoY. Overall slight declines of 2.7% in revenue and 3.1% in EBITDA in local currency terms were reported in the first nine months of the year. VEON remained well positioned with a strong balance sheet and access to sufficient liquidity to allow it to weather current market uncertainty.
Strategic priorities and achievements
Despite the challenging external environment, in 2020, VEON has continued to make progress against its key strategic priorities:
- 4G investments across the Group. VEON is committed to improvement of its network quality and capacity across all markets, and focused on the growth of the 4G customer base, which is an important foundation on which today’s and future’s growth potential rises.
- VEON showed progress on the turnaround in its Russian operation, Beeline, underpinned by considerable network investment, the financial benefits of which it anticipates will come through in the first half of FY 2021.
- In December 2020, Beeline achieved 100% 4G coverage and enabled its customers to access high-speed internet at all stations of the Moscow metro. By the end of November 2020, Beeline users had downloaded 2.5 times more content compared to November 2019.
- Across its digital services businesses, VEON continues to make good progress.
- JazzCash, VEON’s leading digital financial services business in Pakistan surpassed 10m monthly active users in early Q4 – a rise of around 60% year-on- year.
- In the content area, both Beeline TV in Russia and Toffee TV in Bangladesh recorded strong growth.
- VEON’s global partnership with Mastercard, announced earlier this month, broadens the partnership beyond Pakistan to five additional markets, which will serve to speed up the scaling of VEON’s digital financial services businesses by giving consumers and merchants best-in-class products.
- Through VEON Ventures, the Group invested in ShopUp in October 2020, Bangladesh’s leading full-stack B2B commerce platform for small businesses, becoming its first strategic corporate investor. This has enabled its business in Bangladesh, Banglalink, to extend its support to ShopUp’s fast-growing digital ecosystem of micro, small and medium-sized businesses, which form a vital backbone of Bangladesh’s economy, as well as providing it with significant opportunities for developing mobile financial services for ShopUp’s users.
We will share the full announcement with you at 6.00am GMT on Thursday 18 February, but if you have any questions ahead of this, do let me know.