* Tel Austria CEO sticks to guidance, new insights in August
* Open to in-market consolidation, but situation not "hot"
* More civil servants than expected take payoffs
By Georgina Prodhan
LONDON, July 9 (Reuters) - Telekom Austria is sticking to its guidance of slightly lower revenue but steady operating free cash flow for this year, and will have more to say next month once it has run a new forecast, it said.
New Chief Executive Hannes Ametsreiter said macroeconomic and currency uncertainty in some of the carrier's important markets such as Bulgaria and Belarus made predictions hard but said the company would do everything to preserve free cash flow.
"We commit to our guidance, and it's still valid what we said in May," Ametsreiter told Reuters on Thursday, on a visit to London to meet investors and media.
"We are now in a forecast situation so we are running another forecast and I believe that in August we'll have some new insights about the development," he added in an interview.
Ametsreiter said he was open to in-market consolidation, for example in his crowded Austrian home market, but was concentrating on keeping the business in shape in the current difficult circumstances.
"For our group at the moment, it is not M&A time, it is focusing on doing our homework, it is really focusing on operations, it is being as efficient and productive as possible, and it's also about strengthening positions," he said.
"If strengthening position means in-market consolidation, this could be one option," he said, but added: "It's not very hot at the moment."
The Austrian mobile market is seen as overcrowded with four operators active, including, apart from Telekom Austria, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and Hutchison Whampoa's 3 Austria, the smallest operator.
There is little fixed-line competition in Austria compared to other western European countries.
CIVIL SERVANTS
Former state monopoly Telekom Austria is hampered in efforts to lay off workers to cut costs by the high proportion of staff who are civil servants and cannot be fired.
Last year, it sent home about 1,250 employees whom it continued to pay, to save at least on overtime payments.
Ametsreiter said the company was trying to persuade these staff to accept large payoffs as part of a social plan that would take them off Telekom Austria's books for a one-off payment, and that more than expected had accepted so far.
The company had been planning on 400 accepting by the end of 2009, but in fact 500 had already decided to accept, he said, "which means we are saving money as well, we have better results than expected".
Ametsreiter said he believed Telekom Austria, with the advantage of having a fixed-line as well as a mobile network, had also found a good solution to the danger of its mobile network becoming overcrowded as mobile data usage doubled each year.
"If you have very low prices, which we have in Austria, you are reaching a point that your network is being filled and then you need to think about having further investments into capex," he said.
Ametsreiter said the company had found that 80 percent of mobile broadband usage took place in the home, and so for the past two months it had been automatically directing connections to the fixed-line DSL network when users were at home.
The switch happened without customers needing to do anything, Ametsreiter said, and had the added advantage that sending data over fixed lines was far cheaper than doing it over a mobile network.
"It's like we are producing in China. It's like having a low-cost production company, and we are mixing that with the convenience of mobility. That's our hybrid approach," he said. (Additional reporting by Boris Groendahl in Vienna; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)