ROME (dpa-AFX) - Telecom Italia Group (TI, TIAOF.PK) reported that net consolidated profits attributable to Shareholders of the Parent company for the first-half 2015 fell to 29 million euros from 543 million euros in the same period of 2014.
In addition to non-recurring charges and income, they also suffered the negative impact of the bond buyback transactions during the half-year and some items of a purely accounting and valuation nature, which do not generate any financial adjustments, particularly in connection with the valuation at fair value of the implicit option included in the Mandatory Convertible Bond issued late 2013 with a maturity at three years.
In the absence of these impacts the profits of the first half of 2015 would have been over 650 million euros.
EBITDA for the period was 3.633 billion euros down from 4.345 billion euros in the prior year.
Organic EBITDA decreased by 684 million euros (-15.8%) compared with first-half 2014.
EBITDA in the latest-period suffered the negative impact of non-recurring items in the total amount of 399 million euros.
Without these items, the organic change in EBITDA would have been -5.0%, accounting for 39.9% of revenues, down 0.8 percentage points on first-half of 2014.
Revenues for the period amounted to 10.097 billion euros, down 4.3% from the 10.551 billion euros last year. In terms of organic change, calculated by excluding the effect of changes in exchange rates and consolidation area, consolidated revenues were down 3.3%.
The Telecom Italia Group - as announced in the 2015-2017 Plan - will continue to defend its market shares and invest in the development of infrastructures, with a heavy increase in innovative investments.
Overall investments in the Domestic area in the plan horizon will total more than 10 billion euros, around 5 billion euros of which solely for innovative developments (NGN, LTE, Cloud Computing , Data Centres, Sparkle and Transformation), which by 2017 will enable 75% of the population to access optic fibre, and over 95% to access 4G. In Brazil the investments will total over 14 billion reias, with the aim to extend 4G coverage to over 15,000 sites, and 3G coverage to over 14,000 sites by 2017.
For the current year and in line with the trends described in the 2015 - 2017 three-year plan, a progressive improvement is expected in operating performance on both the domestic market (with EBITDA stabilisation target in 2016) and in Brazil.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX