France is proving to be a challenging market for Altice’s SFR Group.
Second quarter results released by Altice show that SFR’s revenues fell by 4.3% YoY pro forma for recent acquisitions of media assets. The latter included NextRadioTV, rebranded SFR RadioTV, which saw its revenues grow by 12.6% YoY in the quarter.
In Portugal, Meo’s revenues declined by 3% YoY in Q2, though this was an improvement on the Q1 2016 fall of 3.5%. Fibre customers increased by 16,000 in the quarter.
In the US, Suddenlink saw subscriber losses in Q2, with those for video services down by 23,000, though this was an improvement on those suffered in the same quarter last year. Moreover, revenue grew by 5.7% YoY on a constant currency (CC) basis.
Meanwhile in Israel, HOT saw YoY increases in revenue (+1.5% an +0.8% on CC and reported bases respectively), though its cable subscriber total fell by 2,000.
Commenting on the results, Michael Combes, CEO of Altice, said: “This quarter saw Altice transform into a leading transatlantic, converged telecoms and media company.
“Having successfully closed the Cablevision acquisition, Altice USA has become the 4th largest cable operator in the attractive and competitive US market. We are very excited about the current performance and future prospects for both Suddenlink and Optimum. We are looking forward, with Dexter Goei, to successfully entering a new era for our businesses across the US which are clearly going to be a huge part of Altice’s new growth story.
“It has been another commercially challenging quarter for SFR in France but we are confident the revenue and Adjusted EBITDA trends will continue to improve with our fibre expansion and accelerated 4G/4G+ network investment program, led by Michel Paulin, already seeing measurable benefits in terms of better quality of service and commercial performance. We are moving forward with our innovative strategy based on the convergence of telecoms, media, content and advertising, enabling us to offer more and more value to our customers. We have also now agreed with labour unions on the next phase of the transformation of the company.
“Meo in Portugal again is showing very strong growth year over year in Adjusted EBITDA from our early efficiency measures, with the revenue trend expected to improve further for the rest of 2016. We are also extremely pleased to see HOTin Israel return to revenue growth as our business in the Dominican Republic continues to show strong growth.
“Overall we remain very focused on improving the operational and financial performance of the businesses we’ve acquired and achieving the efficiency savings we’ve targeted, strengthening the management team in recent months accordingly.”