MTN Group has warned that its subscriber growth has been impacted by price competition and registration regulations. The South African market remains challenging given regulatory and competitive actions.

MTN South Africa showed some progress after a challenging first half but the company also expects conditions to remain challenging for the balance of 2013. The company added 233,000 subscribers in Q313 bringing its total number of subscribers to 25.2 million at the end of the period.

Revenue growth declined year-on-year, mainly due to lower effective voice tariffs and slower subscriber growth. Data remains the largest contributor to revenue growth with an increase of 16.6 per cent year-on-year. Data users increased to 13.9 million.

MTN Nigeria delivered a satisfactory performance, maintaining share, in a highly competitive market. Subscribers grew marginally to 55.6 million. This was impacted by the mandatory SIM registration deadline in July 2013.

MTN Irancell’s subscriber base declined by 1.7 per cent quarter-on-quarter to 41.3 million. The slow-down in gross connections was due to the weakening economy in a fully penetrated market and increased promotional activities by the competitor. Local currency data revenue increased 54.8 per cent year-on-year and now contributes 9.6 per cent to overall revenue. Local currency ARPU increased by 4.3 per cent assisted by the increase in data revenue.

Nawras reported that total revenues for the first nine months of 2013 increased by five per cent to OMR149.2 million (US$387.5 million). The increase in revenue was driven by data and fixed revenues, offset partially by SMS.

EBITDA for the nine months to end-September grew by 4.1 per cent to OMR71.5 million, driven by revenue growth.

As of September 30, total net profit amounted to OMR23.1 million, down 13.5 per cent compared to OMR26.7 million last year. The operator stated that despite higher EBITDA, net profit was affected by higher depreciation due to the investment in network modernisation.

Total customer numbers grew by 10.9 per cent year-on-year, or 231,644, to 2.36 million, with the fixed service customer base growing by nearly 61 per cent to 61,090 from 38,018 a year earlier. The mobile post-paid customer base was up 5.3 per cent year-on-year to 187,163 customers at the end of September, and in the year to date the mobile prepaid customer base increased by 10.4 per cent to 2.11 million.

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.