Unitymedia’s new owner Liberty Global has said the company is seeking to accelerate the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 internet and HD products.
Announcing the German cablenet’s 2009 results, Liberty is looking to build on new services subscriptions that grew by 31% in the last 12 months to close the year on 2 million. The digital subscriber base now represents 30% of the total.
Adjusted cable EBITDA increased 13% to €446 million; consolidated revenue of €1 billion, €463 million adjusted EBITDA, contributed net profit of €77 million, including the satellite platform Arena.
“Unitymedia achieved significant increases in the New Services subscription base, reflecting the strength of our value driven products and consumer brand,” said Gene Musselman, managing director of Unitymedia. Our Unity3play product continues to drive subscriber growth, increasing retail broadband penetration of our basic cable base to 13%, up from 8% a year ago. This highlights the upsell potential of our basic cable base, offering high-speed Internet services with downstream speeds vastly superior to our DSL-based competition. In November, Unitymedia commenced 120 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 broadband access in the cities of Cologne and Aachen as part of a new high speed flat-rate triple play offer.
Retail internet doubled to 584,000 and telephony uptake grew by 61% to 586,000 subscribers.
Musselman, who replaced Palm Sandhu when Unitymedia became an indirect subsidiary of Liberty Global Inc in January, said the company was looking forward to executing on the growth potential for Unity media. The transaction marks an exciting new phase of development as our customers will benefit from strengthened triple play competition, product innovations and access to excellent technological capabilities.”
The digital pay-TV business continues to show underlying growth, offset by churn from customers that subscribed to the former Bundesliga packages, resulting in a 14% reduction over the year to 491,000. With the football contract at an end, no meaningful churn is expected in the future. The arenaSAT satellite subscriber base was at 57,000 subscribers at December 31, 2009, compared to approximately 191,000 subscribers at December 31, 2008.