Liberty Global misses on revenue, profits up
Details
Michelle Clancy
| 28 February 2019

Liberty Global has announced fourth-quarter operating income of $25.1 million on revenue of $2.95 billion, with the latter down 1.2% year-over-year.

Quarterly revenue also missed analyst expectations by $160 million. However, the net earnings are a significant turnaround from the year-ago quarter’s loss of $992 million.

The European cable conglomerate also said that it lost 32,500 subscribers during the quarter, against a subscriber gain of 3,200 in the year-ago quarter. The losses mainly came from Belgium and Switzerland, and were partially offset by improved performance in Poland, Slovakia and DTH operations and at the UK’s Virgin Media.

"The past 14 months have been transformational for Liberty Global,” said CEO Mike Fries.

“After two decades of buying, building and growing world-class cable operations in Europe, we have announced or completed transactions in six of our 12 markets at premium valuations. Together these deals represent an aggregate enterprise value of $31 billion and net cash proceeds to the company, when completed, of $16 billion. It has long been our ambition to create or enable national champions, and we couldn’t be more proud of these fixed-mobile combinations, which will challenge incumbents, accelerate innovation and benefit customers for years to come.”

Liberty Global is the largest cable operator in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Poland and Slovakia, reaching 23 million subscribers collectively in those territories. It also serves another 10 million subscribers in the Netherlands through a joint venture with Vodafone.

Alongside its Q4 earnings, Liberty Global also announced that it's selling its Swiss operation to Sunrise Communications Group in a deal valued at 6.3 billion Swiss francs (about $6.3bn); net cash proceeds are about $2.6 billion.