Switzerland’s second largest phone company by revenue, Sunrise Communications Holdings SA, released its results on 26 March 2015 showing a smaller loss for 2014 than for 2013.
Sunrise listed on the Swiss stock market (ticker symbol: SRCG) on 6 February 2015, in the largest Swiss IPO since 2006. This allowed it to repay some of its debts with the aim of improving its credit rating to reduce its interest bill. On 6 February 2015 Moody’s rated its debt Ba2, their second highest subprime category.
For 2014 Sunrise announced a net loss of CHF 8.4 million, a big improvement on 2013, which delivered a net loss of CHF 81.9 million. Sunrise’s 2014 annual revenue was CHF 2.1 billion, a 3.1% improvement on 2013.
With 2.46 million mobile phone subscribers Sunrise is Swisscom’s closest rival. Swisscom had 6.54 million mobile subscribers and total revenues of CHF 11.7 billion in 2014.
Rivals to Swisscom have typically struggled to make headway against the giant. Swisscom was a government monopoly until the late 1990s, and while competition in mobile is now quite lively, Swisscom still sits on access to fixed lines. Others can connect to fixed line phones but they must pay Swisscom a fee to do it and the size of this fee has caused a lot of friction. Regardless of where you sit on this debate the numbers are telling. The Sunrise brand, launched around 18 years ago in 1997, has 397,600 landline voice subscribers while Swisscom has 2,778,000.
More on this:
Sunrise 2014 reports (in English)
Swisscom 2014 annual report PDF (in English)