The acquisition of the former Royal Philips Electronics and an overall increase in receiver shipments has transformed Pace into one of the top three players in the global set-top box market.
In the past 12 months, the Saltaire-based company has launched over 20 HD PVR products and a new cable decoder to help US MSO Comcast in the transition to digital television, the largest order in Pace’s history.
“We’ve been first to market with both our new customer wins and our existing business,” Pace CEO Neil Gaydon told a press call. “We’ve seen a series of high profile launches including 20 PVRs, and it wasn’t the case of taking one design and then replicating it for different markets, each of these were a specific product designed for a specific operator, there can be different software, different conditional access and different technologies involved.”
Gaydon said he expected the market to grow, particularly in the field of HD product, with a total of 200 million units shipped in the pay-TV market as a whole. “In ’08 we shipped 13 million boxes and the consensus is 15 or 16 million for ’09. It’s a strong statement that the market will be recession proof, but it will certainly be resilient. What we’ve managed to do is to take market share from our competitors, focusing on growing markets, and by focusing on things like DTA [the Digital TV adaptors picked up by Comcast] or HD and PVR we’ve got the right strategy for the company. We are seeing pull forward on products like HD, operators have got to offer more value from their competitors.”
The company achieved record growth in revenues and shipments of £745.5 million (€830.89 million) and 13.1 million respectively. Profit before tax was £13.8 million, compared to £15.4 million in the seven months to December 31, 2007, as Pace change its financial year. The former Philips division now known as Pace France contributed £8.4 million of profit.
Gaydon confirmed that Pace was in conversations with Canvas, the BBC-led IPTV application, arguing that the service would not compete directly with the 50% of the UK market that had chosen a pay-TV service. He said that software that was dedicated to the UK market would not have a direct effect on overall equipment costs.
Speaking about the recall of 90,000 Sky+ HD boxes, Gaydon said Pace continued to have a “very strong” relationship with Sky.
In the context of the company’s 13 million shipments, 90,000 boxes were not significant, and the recall was covered under normal warranty provisions.
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