SiriusXM to pay special dividend
February 2, 2022
By Chris Forrester
North American pay-radio operator SiriusXM reported its quarterly numbers on February 1st (to December 31st) and said it had gained a net 55,000 self-paying subscribers in Q4. That’s the good news. The bad news was that its Pandora streaming music division lost 128,000 subs during final quarter of the year.
Drilling down into its end-of-year report and comparing the current position to that at the end of 2020 and overall (SiriusXM + Pandora) that meant a SiriusXM subscriber decline of 231,000 in the final quarter of the year, compared with a gain of 279,000 in the year-ago period.
SiriusXM stated that its total subscriber count for the year stood at 34.03 million. Pandora ended the year with some 6.93 million subscribers.
SiriusXM’s total quarterly revenue of $2.28 billion was up 4 per cent from the year-ago period, while Q4 advertising income at Pandora also rose 4 per cent to $442 million.
“2021 was an outstanding year across the board,” said SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Witz. “We added more than 1 million net new SiriusXM self-pay subscribers for the 10th time in the past 11 years; this growth continues to be sustained by a fifth straight year of improving churn. Once again we outperformed all of 2021’s public guidance, and now our strong financial position enables us to declare a special cash dividend to our stockholders.”
The company will pay a special dividend of 25 cents/share worth an additional $1 billion to shareholders.