Deutsche Telekom said today its net profit grew nearly six-fold last year.
But the increase was solely a result of one-off items and the group's shares fell heavily on the Frankfurt stock exchange because a closer look at the figures revealed that the company must have posted a heavy loss in the fourth quarter, analysts said.
The German telecommunications giant said in a statement that net profit after exceptional items jumped to euro 7.4 billion (6.96 billion dollars) in 2000 from euro 1.25 billion in the previous year.
Deutsche Telekom did not provide details about what the exceptional items were. Nor did it reveal how much it would have earned without the one-off items.
But the figure will have been inflated by income from the divestment of the group's stakes in GlobalOne, Wind and its cable television networks, as well as income from the flotation of its Internet arm, T-Online.
Even taking those factors into account, the net profit figure of euro 7.4 billion fell way short of analysts' expectations, who had been forecasting after-tax profit of euro 8.1-8.9 billion.
Furthermore, the figure was well below the net profit of euro 8.4 billion posted in the first nine months of the year, suggesting that it made a substantial loss in the fourth quarter, said BHF Bank analyst Werner Staeblein.
Consequently, the group's shares fell sharply on the Frankfurt stock exchange, hitting an intraday low of euro 35.00, down euro 1.73 or 4.7 percent on the day, while the overall market fell by just 0.81 percent.
"They made a loss in the fourth quarter, that much is clear, while most people had been expecting them to break even," said BHF Bank's Staeblein.
AFP