Plans to cut 2,000 jobs took the gloss of TeliaSonera’s continued success in IPTV.
The proposed redundancies represent around 7% of the Swedish-Finnish telco’s overall workforce. They are being brought in as part of a €230 million cost-cutting plan that follows lower than expected quarterly profits.
Expenses at the company, which has significant interests in Central & East Europe and in Asia, are growing at a rate higher than revenues.
Such expenses include the new connected TV solution being introduced with Samsung that elmimates the need for a set-top box. As previously reported in Broadband TV News it will be introduced in Estonia in late 2012 and in Sweden and Finland during 2013.
Swedish IPTV subscriptions currently stand at 1,289,000 from 1,248,000 in the last quarter and 1,137,000 twelve months ago. Customers currently rent approximately 250,000 movies per month over VOD.
In Sweden IPTV revenues benefitted from both an increasing number of subscriptions and higher average revenue per user, while in Finland revenues doubled, as the nascent service there got off the ground.
There was also TV growth in Estonia, where there are now 150,000 subscribers.