The leading Spanish cable operator ONO lost 4,000 TV customers in Q2, ending June with a total of 966,000. Cable TV customers as a proportion of its subscriber base meanwhile fell by 0.1 percentage points to 53.1%, and the penetration of cable TV services over homes released to marketing also fell by 0.1 percentage points, to 13.8%.
The picture was little different in the year ending June 30, with ONO losing 2.5% of its TV customers over the period.
According to the company, the churn in the second quarter was attributable to the difficult macroeconomic environment in Spain – the country has been amongst the hardest hit in Western Europe by the global economic crisis and is only just coming out of an 18-month recession – along with ONO’s decision to discontinue TV as a standalone product and increased focus on acquiring double and triple play customers.
Yet crucially, ONO sees this loss in TV customers as a temporary phenomenon and believes it can claw them back and gain additional revenues from what it terms “a set of innovative solutions.” The most important of these is the advanced TV platform it plans to develop following the signing of an agreement with TiVo this June.
ONO had a total of 4,156,000 RGUs (Revenue Generating Units) as of June 30, or 0.4% more than three months earlier. Of these, the vast majority (4,004,000) were cable, and the remainder (152,000) UUL. Its residential cable subscriber total stood at 1,821,000 (-0.1% down on Q1), and more positively net churn was down (13.4%, -0.8pp) while ARPU was up (51.5%, +0.1%).
ONO also grew its telephony and internet subscriber totals in the second quarter, in the latter instance by 13,000, or 1%, to 1,356,000. According to the company, its strategy of doubling the speed to its 3Mbps and 6 Mbps for an additional €2 has been successful.
ONO’s deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 technology, allowing for internet access speeds of up to 100 Mbps, is also going according to plan and it expects to have almost 70% of its network upgraded by the end of this year.
ONO’s revenues in the second quarter amounted to €368 million, or 3.2% less than in the same period in 2009. EBITDA was meanwhile down by 2% to €176 million and total net debt fell by 6.2% to €3,684 million.
Leave a Reply