After Sky’s quarterly results earlier this month, it was Virgin Media’s turn this week. Virgin Media offers a “quad play” proposition of fibre-optic broadband, home phone, mobile phone and digital TV.
It currently offers its services to approximately 50% of UK homes, covered by its fibre-optic cable network (though it also offers its Virgin National DSL broadband service outside its network area).
Virgin Media is the UK’s second largest digital pay-TV company, and the third largest broadband company. It exceeded the analysts third-quarter expectations and added a net 17,800 customers in the period, with an 8,100 net additions in fibre-optic broadband. The growth was a significant improvement on a 26,200 customer loss in the second quarter.
Neil Berkett, Virgin Media CEO commented: “Our triple-play penetration is at record levels and over 10 per cent of our customers now take all four services from us,” he said. “Our focus remains on attracting high-value customers, who buy more from us and stay longer.”
Total fibre-optic and DSL broadband customer additions increased by 39,000 (up from 5,100 in the second quarter), but worse than last year’s result of 68,700 net additions.
Average revenue per user rose to a record £44.24 from £42 a year ago and enabled Virgin to report a rise in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortisation and other charges from £326m to £348m.
Revenues for the three months to September 30 rose from £940.9m a year ago to £953.4m while the pre-tax loss narrowed from £118.1m to £74.9m. Losses per share halved to 18p. The shares rose 55p to 900p.
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