Cable boost for Thomson set-tops

Cable clients Kabel Deutschland and UPC helped Thomson increase its market for access products in the first half of 2007. Thomson has a reported that it has shipped a total of 11 million access products in the first six months of the year compared to 9.6 million units in the same period in 2006. The French manufacturer shipped 4.7 million satellite set-tops (4.6 million) and 1.2 million cable set-tops (0.7 million). 5.3 million access products were sold into telecom markets.

Thomson has recently begun the shipment of IP set-top boxes to France Telecom and the company anticipates these will increase in the second half of the year. However, it is likely that these will remain limited compared to the Advanced Service Gateways supplied to a number of operators.

Thomson’s network product division has recently secured a multi-million dollar contract with Arqiva for the upgrade of the UK’s transmitter network.

The company noted that its network software operations SmartVision IPTV service platform had a slow first half. Thomson’s software solutions continued to gain ground despite what the company described as “continuing delays in IPTV rollouts for
most operators”.

Consolidated net sales for the Systems Division increased by €82 million to
€1,263 million.