RRsat building up sports transmissions
March 7, 2014
By Chris Forrester
Israel-based RRsat Global Communications is expanding its sports and live events coverage. It recently bought a London facilities house (JCA TV) in order to boost its European contacts, and RRsat’s CEO Avi Cohen, talking to analysts on his company’s earnings call, said that the JCA deal “positioned us in the heart of content creators in London which support all of the Western Europe part of the world, a mature and content rich market. One of the immediate results of this acquisition has been our access to larger upper tier potential customers.”
RRsat also bought in late 2012 SM2 Sports & Media, and this acquisition together with the JCA TV deal represented an increasingly lucrative business segment. Cohen: ”During 2012 [sports and events] contributed less than 4 per cent to our total revenue and in 2013 it accounted for more than 7 per cent of our revenue. We would like to see this become more than 10 per cent over the next few years and we are starting to see related growth around the world. We’re very encouraged by the rapid expansion of this revenue stream.”
Overall revenues for RRsat in Q4 totalled a record $32.5 million compared to $29.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2012 and compared on a sequential basis to our previous record of $30.6 million in the third quarter of 2013. In terms of fourth quarter revenue breakdown, revenues from its digital media services which are composed of content management, content preparation and distribution services amounted to $29.5 million and mobile satellite services contributed $3 million. This compares to $26.8 million and $2.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2012, representing a growth of 9.7 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.
RRsat’s Q4 revenues breakdown by geography was 41 per cent in Europe, 29 per cent in North America, 11.2 per cent in Asia, 7.4 per cent in the Middle East, excluding Israel, 7.5 per cent in Israel and 3.7 per cent in the rest of the world. Its largest customer accounted for approximately 3.8 per cent of revenues and the 10 largest customers contributed approximately 19 per cent of revenues.