Kudelski restructure brings profit
February 28, 2013
Kudelski, the owner of the Nagra video services company, announced its 2012 results to show restructuring has brought a return to profit.
The company said strong performance in emerging markets brought sales of CHF860 million (€704m), down 4 per cent on 2011, and income of CHF68m before restructuring costs and CHF16m net income against – CHF18 million in 2011.
The company said: “The successful completion of the restructuring program initiated in 2011 was the main driver of the turnaround in profitability. The restructuring program enabled the Group to achieve total savings of CHF 86.8 million, of which CHF 71.0 million were delivered in 2012. While the Group has benefited from a more favorable exchange rate development, a stronger USD and emerging countries’ currencies reduced total net savings. Net of CHF 32.0 million restructuring charges, the Group achieved an operating income of CHF 67.7 million, compared to CHF 35.3 million in 2011.
2012 was marked by strong demand for the full Group’s portfolio in South America. Brazil continued to fuel growth, even on the back of the growth experienced in 2011, becoming the second largest market after the US for the Group, with revenues increasing by CHF 25.6 million to CHF 96.3 million.
The Indian market provided a further strong highlight for the Group, with yearly revenues close to double previous year’s and with a stream of new customer wins in the Southern and Western Indian cable markets.
In China, NAGRA won the VoD roll-out for the province of Guangdong targeted for commercial launch in the first half 2013.
Africa’s accelerating TV digitization presents a promising new growth driver where NAGRA’s integrated cost optimized solutions are showing an excellent market fit, as witnessed by wins of greenfield 2013 roll-out projects like Nigeria’s COMSAT satellite launch and Tanzania’s BTL terrestrial platform. SmarDTV has been selected by Canal Overseas as the key technology supplier for their African deployments. In 2012, the African region already provided a material contribution to Integrated Digital TV (hereafter “iDTV”) sales. Africa will remain a focus of our emerging market development strategy for 2013 and beyond, as a new land of opportunity.
In Australia, the Group has won a groundbreaking project at Foxtel for the deployment of a next generation platform. NAGRA will deliver its latest generation MediaLive Service Platform as well as a set-top box software suite, including in particular a new user experience as well as a portfolio of applications. This next generation platform will enable Foxtel to provide a coherent set of services across all their connected set-top boxes and home devices such as tablets and smart phones.
OpenTV5, NAGRA’s next-generation HTML5 middleware platform, successfully launching with Telefonica on a worldwide basis has also been selected by Starhub along with the MediaLive Service Platform as the core of their new generation of hybrid boxes and home gateways. The new OpenTV5 platform enables the distribution of video services within the home cloud and beyond to support TV and extended media consumption across numerous devices.”