Montabaur, May 11, 2010. The Management Board of United Internet AG (ISIN DE0005089031) today announced the consolidated results according to IFRS for the first quarter of 2010.

Group development

Consolidated sales of United Internet AG grew by 13.0% in the first quarter of 2010, from EUR 409.4 million last year to EUR 462.8 million. Despite high expenses for the current DSL quality drive and start-up costs for new business fields, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) improved by 8.1%, from EUR 83.5 million to EUR 90.3 million. Due in particular to scheduled higher depreciation following the acquisition of freenet's DSL customers, earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) remained virtually unchanged at EUR 70.7 million (prior year: EUR 70.8 million). Earnings per share (EPS) improved slightly from EUR 0.16 last year to EUR 0.17.

Segment development

"Access" segment In the "Access" segment, sales in the first quarter of 2010 grew by 19.3% to EUR 300.8 million. EBITDA improved by 42.2% to EUR 31.7 million, while EBIT grew by 17.2% to EUR 25.2 million due to scheduled write-downs on the acquired freenet DSL customer base.

Compared to December 31, 2009, the number of fee-based contracts in this segment remained stable at 3.50 million, of which 3.31 million were DSL contracts. A further 90,000 complete DSL contracts (of particular importance for customer retention) were added in the period under review. With the aid of an MVNO agreement (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) signed with Vodafone in March 2010, United Internet will increasingly target the dynamically growing mobile internet market from summer 2010 onward.

"Applications" segment

In the "Applications" segment, significant investments were made in customer growth during the first quarter of 2010. This helped boost the number of fee-based contracts by 180,000 to 5.83 million world-wide. Sales growth in this segment was slowed by the contract conversion of a major customer of AdLINK subsidiary affilinet in late 2009. As a result, listed subsidiary AdLINK Internet Media AG posted a fall in sales of 23.5% in the first quarter of 2010 - whereas the rest of the segment enjoyed growth of 11.2%. Total segment sales thus grew by 3.0% from EUR 157.1 million to EUR 161.8 million. Despite increased marketing expenses and high pre-launch costs for new applications, segment EBITDA and EBIT grew by 3.2% to EUR 60.5 million and by 1.3% to EUR 47.4 million, respectively.

Customer contracts outside Germany grew to 2.30 million and accounted for 80,000 of total growth in customer contracts of 180,000. The number of ad-financed accounts increased from 26.3 million to over 27.0 million in the first quarter.

Outlook

In view of the successful start to fiscal 2010, the company confirms its forecasts and expects consolidated sales to grow by around 15%. Despite high expenses for the current DSL quality drive and further increased development and marketing costs in the following quarters for investments in new business fields and further foreign expansion, EBITDA is expected to remain at the record level of the previous year (without positive special items of 2009).

The company's financial statements for the first quarter of 2010 will be published together with the 3-Month Report for 2010 on May 12, 2010.

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