Millicom, the emerging markets operator with an eye on new segments including mobile money, saw a satisfying jump of nearly ten per cent in underlying revenue in the first quarter of 2015.

The group’s organic revenue was $1.44 billion, an increase of 9.7 per cent over Q1 2014. The figure does not include the newly acquired Colombia cable operator UNE, the kind of diversification pursued by Millicom in its search for new growth.

Likewise mobile financial services chipped in with an impressive revenue growth of 43 per cent, albeit only to $31 million, two thirds of which came from the group’s African operations.

Mobile money added 110,000 new users in the first quarter and reached a customer base of 9.6 million, up 31 per cent over the past year. The main contributors in the first quarter were Democratic Republic of Congo, Honduras, Senegal and Guatemala.

Year-on-year, Millicom added almost 1.3 million new money users in Africa, which it attributed to an interoperability scheme in Tanzania and a new savings product recently launched in Rwanda.

However, a little shine came off with the ARPU figures for mobile money, $1.06, an increase of just one per cent in local currency year-on-year. While ARPU was up by 17 per cent to $2 in the South American region, it fell by 9.4 per cent to $0.3 in Central America. Africa fell somewhat in the middle with an increase of 6 per cent to $1.1.

At the group level, EBITDA shot up 18 per cent in the first quarter to $565 million. But EBITDA margins were lower than last year (33.1 per cent against 34 per cent). And the group had higher depreciation and amortisation charges than in the 2014 quarter. Plus this year’s figure was not buoyed by a $2.2 billion one-off boost to its non-operating income, as was the case in 2014. The result was a loss of $46 million in Q1 2015, as opposed to a $2.24 billion net profit in Q1 2014.