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Deutsche Telekom wants to halve office space in Germany

2022-08-11T13:32:59.187Z


Telekom boss Höttges can surprise almost 200,000 new customers in this country - and wants to massively expand hybrid work. The company's premises had not been fully utilized in the past anyway.


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Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges: Hopes for earnings of 37 billion euros before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization

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Henning Kaiser / dpa

While in many companies employees are returning to the office after several corona breaks, Deutsche Telekom is taking a different approach.

Sooner or later, the company wants to reduce almost half of its office space in Germany.

"Both in Darmstadt and in Bonn, 50 percent of the office space will disappear in the medium term," said CEO Tim Höttges in a conference call.

“We were oversized in the past because employees were also on site with customers.” Most recently, with a view to a possible gas embargo, it was also said that offices could become colder in order to save energy.

CEO Höttges now said that in future employees should have the opportunity to do their work in a hybrid way.

The fact that the work area is reduced should not give any indication of how important a location is.

The manager gave no details on the exact time frame.

With a view to the current year, on the other hand, Telekom has once again raised its annual targets.

Things went surprisingly well on the home market, where the company was able to score points with new contract customers in addition to better sales development.

Competitors have recently suffered from the more consumer-friendly termination rights.

Almost 200,000 new contract customers

After deducting terminations, 194,000 new contract customers were recently added under their own brand and thus more than in the same quarter of the previous year, the company, which is listed on the Dax, announced in Bonn.

Analysts had expected a significant decline compared to the previous year's figure of around 161,000.

However, Telekom, like other competitors, is feeling the effects of the changes in the Telecommunications Act (TKG): With around 45,000 new broadband connections, the value has more than halved compared to the previous year.

"We are still feeling the after-effects of the TKG effect, but this should phase out in the second half of the year," said CFO Christian Illek.

Automatically extended contracts can now be terminated after the minimum term has expired after one month and not only after one year.

The competition is also feeling the effects of the new termination regulations.

Although Telefonica Germany was able to report a significant increase in new contract customers.

The British competitor Vodafone, on the other hand, achieved only a minimal increase in this country, and the United Internet subsidiary 1&1 also had to struggle.

profit should increase

Meanwhile, Telekom's consolidated sales for the months of April to June climbed by almost six percent to around EUR 28 billion.

Under its own steam, i.e. adjusted for exchange rate effects and portfolio changes, the revenue was flat.

The more valuable service revenue with services meanwhile increased by almost eleven percent.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization including leasing costs (Ebitda AL), adjusted for special effects, were around 9.9 billion euros - an increase of five percent compared to the same period last year.

However, the adjusted operating result declined slightly from own resources: In addition to exchange rate effects, the integration costs resulting from the merger of T-Mobile US and Sprint also had an impact.

The bottom line is that the net profit fell by around 22 percent to just under 1.5 billion euros, also because of the merger costs and because of a comparison after a hacker attack.

For the year as a whole, Deutsche Telekom wants to achieve slightly better operating results than it has done so far.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization including leasing costs adjusted for special effects should rise to around 37 billion euros in the current year, it said.

So far, the group had targeted more than 36.6 billion euros.

At the same time, Deutsche Telekom wants to significantly reduce its debt ratio.

apr/dpa

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2022-08-11

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