'United Internet revenues grow 3.7%, raises forecast'

Germany-based ISP United Internet reports a 3.7 percent increase in revenues to EUR 844.5 million for the first half of this year, compared with the same period in 2008. The EBITDA grew by 1.4 percent to EUR 174.2 million and the EBIT grew by the same percentage to EUR 148 million. Due to negative profit contributions of associated companies and higher interest expenses, United Internet's net profit decreased 7.8 percent year-on-year to EUR 82.7 million and the earnings per share (EPS) amounted to EUR 0.36 compared with EUR 0.39 in the previous year. The product segment saw its revenues grow by 6.1 percent to EUR 745.6 million, while the online marketing segment reports a 11.5 percent drop in revenues to EUR 98.6 million, due to the economic crisis causing a slump in advertising. On 30 June of this year United Internet had 9.05 million paying customers including the approximetaly 700,000 Freenet DSL users, which were acquired in May of this year. The total number of internet customers grew to 3.63 million including 3.47 DSL customers, growing by 23 percent during the second quarter of this year. United Internet's DSL customer base consists of 1.89 million resale customers and 1.58 million unbundled customers. Freenet's webhosting customer base grew by 100,000 during the quarter to 3.96 million on 30 June of this year, This includes 2.07 webhosting users outside Germany. The management board of United Internet has raised its forecasts for the full year and now expects revenues to grow by around 5 percent over the comparable prior-year figure of EUR 1.57 billion. A similar year-on-year increase of around 5 percent is also expected for EBITDA and EBIT. The number of customer contracts is expected to grow by around 1.25 million by year-end 2009 to approx. 9.20 million, including approx. 3.42 million DSL contracts (+600,000).

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Related terms: advertising, contributions, dsl, ebitda, eps, forecasts, germany, internet, isp, marketing, net profit, profit