A 5.3 percent year-on-year increase in revenues from its American subsidiary helped Deutsche Telekom to stabilize its half-year results.
T-Mobile USA brought in €7.7 billion to DT’s coffers between January and June, while EBITDA was up 15.8 percent at €2 billion.
The figures represent something of a turnaround for the US division following its failed sale to AT&T last year.
However, the devil is very much in the detail; Q2 revenues were down in dollar terms while the subsidiary registered a loss of 205,000 subscribers over the same period, suggesting the upturn may be short-lived.
Nevertheless, DT was grateful for the boost given overall group revenues fell 0.9 percent to €28.8 billion.
Adjusted net profit fell 15.3 percent to €1.4 billion.
"We are keeping our word and providing a good deal of reliability to the market with very solid figures," said René Obermann, DT’s CEO.
"We do of course continue to face a number of challenges, but we are performing very respectably compared with our competitors."
Revenues declines were registered across DT’s European businesses.
In its core German market, revenues fell 2.7 percent to €11.3 billion.
DT said a one percent fall in service revenues from mobile communications was “once again unsatisfactory”.
The number of mobile customers grew by 464,000 in Q2 alone, but DT said most of these were added in the reseller segment, which generates lower ARPU.
Its IPTV service Entertain also grew over 40 percent and now has 1.8 million subscribers.
Greece, DT’s second largest European market, saw revenues fall 5.8 percent to €1.6 billion.
Across Europe, smartphones now account for 60 percent of all the devices DT sells, up from 43 percent one year ago, which in turn has led to 21.2 percent increase in mobile data revenues.
T-Systems, DT’s enterprise business, suffered a disappointing six months.
After being the company’s star performer last year, revenues were down one percent at €4.5 billion in H1.
DT said this was due to “sustained competitive pressure and price erosion in the ITC industry”.
However, it also noted “a pleasing trend in new orders”, which were up 8.2 percent; in the last two months, for example, it announced deals with energy giants BP and RWE Deutschland.
The company said its full-year forecast remained unchanged.