Telecom Plus to pay divi, sees profits at lower end of range

Multi utility services provider Telecom Plus said it would still pay a final dividend as it warned annual profits would come in at the lower end of guidance.

Adjusted pre-tax profit for the year to March 31 was forecast at around £60m, up from £56.3m year on year, due to lower retail prices from October reflecting a cut in the UK regulatory price cap, higher regulator charges and initial costs associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Telecom Plus said it would pay its final dividend of 30p a share, making a total of 57p for the year, up from 52p a year ago. The guidance was conditional on the “absence of a significant increase in the level of non-payment by customers over the coming months”, it warned.

Full year customer numbers rose 2.7% to 652,237 while service numbers grew 6.2% to 2,689,639.

The company on Tuesday said its meter operator subsidiary, UW Home Services (UWHS) had seen installation of smart meters come “to a complete standstill” in late March as the UK government implemented a lockdown, after putting in 20,000 a month previously.

Telecom Plus said it had cancelled more than 20,000 future appointments which would be “challenging, time consuming and costly to reschedule”.

“In the meantime, UWHS continues to carry out emergency meter works for customers on a national basis, but is now significantly sub-scale notwithstanding that many engineers have been furloughed,” the company said.

“It is unclear how long it will take after the lock-down is lifted before UWHS returns to its previous level of operational efficiency.”

It added that uncertainty over bad debts, the duration of social distancing restrictions, and the impact Covid-19 would have on the broader economy “make the range of possible outcomes for full year 2021 much wider than usual”.