“Incredible year” for SiriusXM
February 4, 2016
By Chris Forrester
Pay-radio operator SiriusXM outperformed market expectations last year by a considerable amount. CEO James Meyer told analysts that 2015 was “an incredible year” for SiriusXM.
“We exceeded all of our original operational and financial goals, and we are predicting continued growth in subscribers and all of our financial metrics this year. Last January, we told you to expect 1.2 million net new subscribers. We actually delivered 2.3 million, taking our paying subscriber base to an all-time high of approximately 29.6 million,” he said.
Financially, the expected metrics were all exceeded. “We told you that we would do approximately $4.4 billion of revenue in 2015, and we actually reached nearly $4.6 billion. We told you we would attain $1.6 billion of adjusted EBITDA and our final result was $1.66 billion. And we told you we would deliver $1.25 billion of free cash flow, and we exceeded that too with $1.3 billion,” stated Meyer.
The company, now controlled by Liberty, spent just over $2 billion buying back 524 million of its own shares.
SiriusXM wrapped 2015 with 82 million Sirius-XM-equipped cars on the road (or as Meyer put it “1/3rd of the USA’s used car fleet!”) although not all are subscribing. Last year saw 28 percent of used cars on the road were equipped with subscriptions to the pay-radio service, up from 24 percent the year previous.