Telenet has said it added 22,700 triple play subscribers during the first quarter of the year, its best result since Q4 2009, to a total of 805,800, representing 37% of its overall customer base.
However, the total number of cable customers is still declining with 2,180,700 homes connected at the end of Q1, down 3% from 2,253,700 at the end of Q1 2011. “This implies a net organic loss of 73,000 basic cable TV subscribers, reflecting the intensely competitive environment and the availability of competing digital platforms in our footprint,” Telenet said in a press statement.
The total number of digital TV homes was up 14%, from 1,229,000 to 1,401,200. Analogue only homes were down 24%, to 779,500, from 1,024,700 a year earlier.
The number of digital TV homes stood at 64% as of March 31, 2012 as compared to 55% at the end of March 2011.
In June last year, Telenet acquired the exclusive broadcasting rights for the most important fixtures of the Belgian football championship and subsequently revamped its sports pay television channels into Sporting Telenet. At the end of March 2012, approximately 182,000 customers subscribed to the cabler’s pay television sports channels (+51% year-on-year).
Duco Sickinghe, Telenet’s chief executive officer, said in a statement: “2012 got off to a great start and the solid progress we have achieved in the first quarter of 2012, both in operational and financial terms, has set the basis for another year of solid growth in our business. Despite the macro?economic challenges and the intensely competitive environment, we have achieved robust net new subscriber growth across all our core residential products of digital TV, broadband internet and fixed telephony.
“We were particularly pleased with the strong take?up of our triple?play products in the quarter, adding 22,700 net new triple play subscribers, which was our best performance since Q4 2009. At present, approximately 37% of our customer base is subscribing to all three fixed products compared to 33% a year ago. The continued increase in the average number of services per unique customer, together with a growing contribution from our Sporting Telenet pay television sport channels and the favorable impact from selective price increases, reflecting an overall increase in the underlying cost of living, resulted into a €4.2 year-on-year increase in our ARPU per unique subscriber to €44.8, which was our strongest performance since Q4 2009.”