UK flies broadband flag for Tiscali

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By Tim Richardson • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 13th May 2005 10:35 GMT

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Tiscali UK is driving the take-up of broadband at the European ISP, the company announced yesterday.

Overall, Tiscali had 1.2m broadband users at the end of March - up 150,000 compared to the end of December. It didn't break out the numbers by countries but said the increase was "mainly achieved in the UK thanks to Tiscali's competitive offers. The UK market is expanding rapidly, and therefore offers excellent prospects over the next few months".

The total number of dial-up and broadband users at the end of March reached 5.2m. The fall in the number of dial-up users reflects the fact that Tiscali has sold off a number of country operations, most recently Tiscali France.

First quarter revenues were €239.7m with turnover from net access making up the bulk of takings. Of the €178m generated by net access fees, dial-up accounted for €85.5m while broadband delivered €92.5m.

The group made a pre-tax loss of €17.9m in Q1, a 30 per cent improvement on the €52.1m loss in the same period last year. This improvement was down to the extraordinary income generated from the sale of South African and Danish subsidiaries.

With restructuring mostly completed, Tiscali is now looking to generate more cash from users by increasing the take-up of voice and data services in the Netherlands, the UK and Germany combined with migrating more punters onto unbundled services. ®