SES H1: Video still under pressure
August 4, 2022
By Chris Forrester
While the market will no doubt be talking about a potential merger between SES and Intelsat, SES reported its half-year financials on August 4th. However, the numbers show that SES’s Video division, still a very important element of the company’s revenue stream, was down 7 per cent (y-o-y) despite being helped by a growing income stream from its HD+ service and Sports & Events activity.
Overall, SES’s underlying revenue was 3.3 per cent lower at €888 million. Its Networks segment was again a good performer (+2.1 per cent y-o-y) and worth €387 million and helping net profit to grow 11 per cent (y-o-y) to $168 million.
Highlights mentioned by CEO Steve Collar included the launch of SES-22, fulfilling a C-band role over North America, now in active service. Collar said that the operator’s C-band clearing timetable was very much on track. Additional revenue coming from Verizon was now on track and expected to deliver $170 million later this year.
SES-17 was now in service and when combined with contracted backlog for O3b’s mPOWER, were worth $930 million in backlog. Overall contracted backlog at June 30th 2022 was €5.1 billion (€5.8 billion gross backlog including backlog with contractual break clauses.
As at June 30th 2022, SES delivered 8,028 total TV channels to 366 million TV homes around the world, including 3,092 High Definition TV channels. 72 per cent of total TV channels are broadcast in MPEG-4, with an additional 6 per cent broadcast in HEVC.