Telefonica plans growth

Telefonica shares rose by eleven percent on Thursday as the company promised to speed up it’s debt reduction programme as well as scale back acquisitions and increase dividends by a third.

Telefonica is the world’s fifth most valuable telecom operator.

The firm anticipates a massive increase in new mobile phone connections in Latin America, as well as an rise in demand for 3G services in Europe.

The firm anticipates this demand will lead to a forty percent organic growth of their customer base in the next four years, which works out as a revenue growth of between four and eight percent a year.

The previous three years has seen the firm grow rapidly including a number of acquisitions including 02 in the UK, though the firm did restrict acquisitions in the previous eighteen months to one and a half billion Euros.