Telecom Egypt posts 9.7% rise in 2009 profit
3/15/2010

(MENAFN) Telecom Egypt announced a 9.7 percent hike in 2009's net profit, saying that it earned $559 million through the year compared to $766 million in 2008, Al-Ahram newspaper reported. Telecom Egypt, the country's landline monopoly, said that 2009's revenue was $2.73 billion, against $2.78 billion in 2008. The figures provided equate to a fourth-quarter net profit of $132.2 million on revenue of $604 million. The firm has struggled against a surge of mobile substitution, customers eschewing land-line phones in favor of competitively priced mobile offers, and cut off some two million land-lines earlier in the year as it tightened its credit policy to slash debt exposure. It is worth mentioning that Telecom Egypt owns a 45 percent stake in Vodafone Egypt, which added revenue of $387 million in the year, compared to $360 million in 2008.