Virgin advanced video gives boost to Liberty fiscal year
Details
Editor
| 15 February 2018

Its acquisition splurge may be a thing of the past as it attempts to rebalance a huge asset mix and focus on key markets, but cable giant Liberty Global has revealed key signs as to where future growth will likely occur.

According to its results for the fiscal year ended 31 December 2017, Liberty Global generated total overall revenues of $15.049 billion, $3.988 of which were generated in the fourth quarter. These represented yearly rises of 2.3% and 2.9% respectively. However, operating income for both the year and the quarter fell sharply, 21.6% and 27.4%, to total $1.947 billion and $496 million respectively.

One of the key drivers to revenue growth in the fourth quarter was a 4% increase at Virgin Media, the company’s largest subsidiary, to total £3 billion. In a strong year Virgin delivered 159,000 new premises in Q4 and 536,000 for 2017 as a whole and nowhere was the growth more noticeable than in the video business line where the company performed a noticeable turnaround compared with the previous year. During 2017 it added 86,000 Video RGUs in 2017, compared with a 36,000 loss in 2016. While it loss just over 5,000 basic video subscribers over the year, it added 91,100 enhanced video subs at the same tie leading to a total video footprint of 4.12 million customers, up 2.1% annually. In the fourth quarter there were 2,100 enhanced video adds leading to a net total of 300.

Just over a million subscribers, 27% of its UK video base, have now taken the Virgin V6 set-top box (STB) to support enhanced video since its December 2016 launch. V6 subscribers have what the company says is meaningfully higher NPS and not surprisingly Virgin is concentrating on accelerating take-up of the STB with the launch of a customer upgrade programme.

The yearly results did however show that growth was a challenge at other key Liberty subsidiaries such as UPC and Unity media. At the former, the Q4 video base declined by 2,000 RGUs, as a 27,000 gain in CEE was more than offset by a 29,000 loss in Switzerland and Austria. However, just like with Virgin, next-gen video was increasingly popular with the next-gen Horizon TV subscriber base, up by 135,000 in Q4 and now accounting for around 30% of the total cable video base. With Unitymedia, though there were 36,000 net video losses during the year, virtually all of the damage in the basic line.