Belgacom announces 2008 results

For full-year 2008, the Belgacom Group (Brussels: BELG) reports a revenue of EUR 5,986 million. Excluding the non-recurring revenue following the sale of Certipost, this is EUR 5,978 million or a 1.4% decline compared to 2007. The total revenue of 2008 includes the revenue generated by Tango and Scarlet, consolidated respectively as from August 2008 and December 2008, for a total amount of EUR 52 million.

Consumer Business Unit (CBU)

Since its launch in June 2005, Belgacom TV has proved very successful, with a rapidly growing customer base. In a period of three and a half years, Belgacom managed to increase its market share in the Digital TV domain to a strong 30% by end 2008. The population coverage also increased significantly over the years: at year-end 2008, over 86% of Belgian households could access Belgacom TV and more than 64% could watch in High Definition.

In 2008, Belgacom added 201,000 new TV users, a considerable rise compared to the 166,000 users in 2007. Customer growth peaked in the fourth quarter of 2008, with a total of 63,000 net adds, due to successful year-end promotions. By end 2008, Belgacom had a total of 506,000 Belgacom TV users, including the growing number of customers connecting a second TV set. Benefitting from the roll-out of VDSL2, Belgacom was able to further enhance its TV offer. The capacity was considerably raised, enabling an increasing number of customers to connect a second TV set. Over 2008, the take-up of second TV connections has therefore increased significantly to 65,000 customers.

Despite the year-end promotions which impacted the ARPU in the fourth quarter, the overall 2008 TV ARPU continued its positive evolution and grew 7% to EUR 17.2, compared to EUR 16.1 in 2007. An important driver of this continued improvement is the success of on-demand services.

Operationals (thousands):

                                    Year ended 31 December              2008/2007
                                    ----------------------   --------------------                         
                                          2007        2008   Variance  Variance %
                                    ----------  ----------   --------  ----------
TV                                         305         506        201       65.7%
  Of which TV-second stream users           25          65         40           -

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