América Móvil pay-TV growth slows
Details
Juan Fernandez Gonzalez
| 04 February 2017

Although still a growing business across Latin America, pay-TV has reported weaker growth than other telecom businesses for América Móvil.


During Q4 2016, Carlos Slim’s telco reported 1.9% growth in pay-TV accesses across the region, while mobile subscriptions grew by 5.3% and broadband households by 7.4%. Such subs figures have driven América Móvil revenues to rise by 16.9% year-on-year in Mexican peso terms and 3.7% at constant exchange rates.

EBITDA came in at €3.15 billion, 2.9% higher than last year in Mexican peso terms, but down by 8.1% at constant exchange rates.

No specific pay-TV data has been published for every specific market, but América Móvil reports broadband to generally have driven most of the fixed business growth.

In Brazil, the telco’s largest TV market, fixed businesses closed the final quarter of 2016 with 36.7 million revenue-generating units (RGU). According to the latest report from telecom authority Anatel, América Móvil’s pay-TV operators were down by 0.5% in December 2016, but leading the market with 9.9 million subscribers.

In Colombia, where América Móvil also leads the pay-TV market through Claro, it ended the period with 4% more pay-TV households than the previous year. Cable TV digits were also on the up in Peru (+5.3%), where América Móvil is far from the dominant position held by Telefónica.

“Several operations, including Mexico, Colombia, the US, Puerto Rico and Peru, posted their best numbers for service revenue growth in at least four quarters. In Central America, they continued to expand although at a lower rate,” highlighted América Móvil’s report,*analysing the big picture.

“Mexico contributed 24.1% of our service revenues followed by Brazil with 21.6%, the US with 15.8% and Telekom Austria Group with 9.4%.”