Orange has reported another decline in quarterly revenues even as its customer base grows.

The company said that revenues fell by four per cent to €10.16 billion (US$13.9 billion), after a 4.8 per cent fall in the previous quarter. Excluding the impact of regulatory measures, the decline would have been 2.4 per cent in the third quarter.

In France, revenues fell by 4.9 per cent, in Belgium down by 10.1 per cent and down by 2.6 per cent in Poland. Revenues rose though in Spain, by 6.9 per cent. In Africa and the Middle East, revenues grew 4.1 per cent led by Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Guinea and Senegal.

EBITDA fell by seven per cent to €3.37 billion.

Orange ended September with 232.5 million customers – a rise of 1.1 million. The increase in fixed broadband (190,000 net additions) offset the downturn in traditional fixed-line telephony.

The Africa and the Middle East division had a combined total of 84.6 million mobile customers at end-September, up 6.8 per cent year-on-year, mainly led by Mali, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire.

Nawras has named Greg Young as the company’s CEO with immediate effect, replacing Ross Cormack, who has been appointed as the new CEO of Ooredoo in Myanmar.

Ooredoo is a majority shareholder in Nawras.

Prior to joining Nawras, Young was CEO of Sri Lanka Telecom, which is the largest telco in Sri Lanka and the second largest publically listed company with over 10,000 employees.

ZTE has issued a brief financial statement and says that its profits for the first nine months of this year jumped by 132 per cent over the previous year, although revenues fell.

Net profit came in at RMB552 million (US$90 million) from January to September. Revenue dropped 10 per cent to RMB54.66 billion.

ZTE posted a quarterly profit after extraordinary items in the July-September period, ending a negative sequence that began in Q212. ZTE forecasts the company will post a full-year net profit in 2013, after a loss in 2012.

The positive operational cash flow reported in the third quarter followed a sequence of negative cash flow in the July-September periods in 2009 to 2012.

During the reporting period, ZTE says that capital investment by mobile network operators remained sluggish, with spending focused on 4G networks and the construction of broadband networks, and their ancillary transmission networks. There was also progress in the development of emerging sectors such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things.

Internationally, ZTE continued to focus its efforts in major and globally-leading carriers, and gained strong momentum in key sectors such as enterprise and government ICT solutions, services and mobile devices, while consolidating its share of the telecommunications network infrastructure market.

Vodafone has expressed interest in buying out the stake in its Egyptian joint venture with Telecom Egypt, sending the landline monopoly’s share price surging to its highest level since early this year.

Vodafone Egypt is a joint venture between the two companies, with Telecom Egypt owning a 45 per cent stake in the company. The stake has been valued at around US$2 billion.

There have been expectations that Telecom Egypt may sell its stake for the past year or so ever since the telecom regulator said it would grant the landline monopoly an MVNO licence to start offering its own mobile services.

Vodafone is now ready to buy the 45 per cent stake, an official at the company told Bloomberg News, declining to be identified because he is not authorised to comment on the matter.

Telecom Egypt is listed on the local stock exchange, but is 80 per cent owned by the government.

Zimbabwean mobile network operator, TelOne has written off US$80 million of its customers’ bills in a one-off reduction being applied to their accounts.

The company, which is state-owned will apply a credit equivalent to US$257.82 to each customer account.

Some customers are said to have accrued substantial debts with the phone provider due to the currency crisis that hit the country some years ago.

TelOne said that the cancellation was in view of the "cash-flow challenges currently facing our clients across the market", and more likely reflecting the reality that it would not be able to recover the unpaid debts that had been built up in recent years.

The currency problems also affected the telecom networks, which struggled to buy infrastructure that was usually billed for in US dollars.