The development mirrors growing revenue at Wanadoo [NAD.PA], Europe’s second-largest ISP, and the narrowed net loss at Spanish Internet service provider Terra Lycos.
For the third quarter to September 30, T-Online reported net profit of E3 million ($3.4 million), compared with a net loss of E292 million ($336.4 million).
The profit surprised the market, and was mainly due a rise in the value of one of T-Online’s investments, specifically the write-up of E34 million ($39.1 million) on its 21.35% stake in online stockbroker Comdirect. For the same period, revenue grew to E452.7 million ($521.6 million) from E377.4 million ($434.8 million) in the year-ago period.
During the quarter, subscribers increased to 12.9 million, 1 million more than a year ago, and an increase of 231,000 from the end of June.
Like most other ISPs, T-Online was boosted by the rising number of customers signing up for high-speed Internet services. Broadband or ASDL accounted for 30% in Germany, and 27% in the group as a whole. At the end of June, 25% of customers used broadband, as opposed to 20% a year ago.
The Darmstadt, Germany-based arm of Deutsche Telekom AG [DT] also recently launched a broadband project called T-Online Vision.
This connects a television to the Internet via a set-top box, and paves the way for receiving movies down the pipe and watching them on the family TV.
Essentially, T-DSL users can call up the films in streaming mode and view them for a fee of between E3 ($3.46) and E4 ($4.61) for 24 hours access to the movie of their choice. Customers pay using MicroMoney, the T-Pay charge card, or, for T-Online customers, the Deutsche Telekom telephone bill.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
