Darroch sheds light on Sky results
July 29, 2013
By Chris Forrester
BSkyB CEO Jeremy Darroch, in a telephone call with investment analysts, delivered some useful extra information on last week’s results.
Here are some highlights (in Darroch’s words):
“What remains a challenging consumer environment in the UK, customers continue to choose Sky over other providers. Over the year we grew pay for subscription products by 3.3 million. Of this, 2.6 million came from organic growth and a further 700,000 from the acquisition of O2’s consumer broadband business.”
“In terms of [net] TV growth, both group DTH and NOW TV, the bulk [of the growth] was NOW TV relative to DTH, but they were both positive
“Churn for the year was 10.9 per cent. Now whilst this was up a bit on the previous year, it reflects our growth to striking the right balance between working to retain customers, we’re also recognizing similarly tougher economic times.”
“The proportion of our customers taking all three of TV, broadband and telephony continues to grow strongly but by 3 percentage points to reach 35 per cent of our base. And as a result of this product growth, ARPU once again increased by a further £29 to a new high of £577.”
“We saw an average of 6.2 million repeat downloads in Q4 fully five times the levels seen just a year ago.”
“Since 2008 we have more than doubled up our pay for subscription products to over 31 million. We’ve also added more than 2 million new customers and they are spending more with us on average £150 more in 2013 compared to 2008.”