Pace says it has made significant progress in the rationalisation of it supply chain. The pay-TV technology developer has now selected two so-called core Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) partners and intends to consolidate manufacturing within the two companies by the end of 2013.
Announcing its 2012 financials, the Saltaire company said the disruption to supplies of hard disk drives that had previously led to the issue of a profit warning had been a major challenge in 2012. However, it had been able to contain the issue in the first half of the year with an adverse impact of $76.8 million (€58.71 million) to revenue and $23.1 million to operating profit, well below initial expectations.
Overall revenues were up 4.1% on the previous year to $2,403.4 million, boosted by demand from DirecTV and Comcast for Media Server products. Post tax profits increased 50.5% to $58.4 million.
Pace has benefitted from the move to Media Servers and whole home solutions that are now starting to move beyond the United States, leading to a number of key wins in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America that will be deployed in 2013 and 2014 including Foxtel, Telenet and Get TV in Norway.
The company has been running field trials of an integrated solution consisting of TiVo software and Pace STBs and Gateways, though has not yet announced any customer wins.
European revenues were down by 12.1% to $402.4 million. The company blames a fragmented and highly customer specific territory, adding that it has not been helped by a reduced win rate of new products in 2011, though says this will improve following key wins in new and existing customers.
