Dutch cable operator Ziggo has said over one million Wi-Fi hot spots have been activated with usage increasing every day.
The operator said its roll-out of Wi-Fi hot spots across its footprint is a huge success. Over one million Wi-Fi spots were activated since launch with number of users and data offloaded growing every day. The hot spots offer free Wi-Fi access to its customers when travelling within the operator’s footprint.
Reporting results over the third quarter of the year, the cabler also said that churn in customer base is showing a decline compared to previous quarters. The operator now has 2,811,000 TV customers, out of 4,237,000 homes passed. 2,280,000 are digital TV customers, with the remaining 532,000 taking analogue TV only.
The operator has now a digital TV penetration of 83.8% of its customer base. There are 863,000 digital pay-TV subscribers, down from 956,000 a year ago. The number of TV-only subscribers decreased by 23.3% compared to the same quarter last year, to a total of 794,000 as at September 30, 2013.
Ziggo’s All-in-1 bundle subscribers are up 37,000, resulting in 2.5% q-o-q growth and 8.2% y-o-y growth; All-in-1 bundle penetration reaches 53.9% of the company’s consumer customer base.
Revenues for digital pay TV was down 2.7% y-o-y with loss of pay-TV subscribers partially offset by high growth of VoD transactions, up 43% y-o-y.
Total revenue was up 2.9% y-o-y to €391.1 million; organic revenue excluding set-top box sales and ‘revenue from other sources’ up 0.9%.
“The number of TV-only subscribers decreased by 23.3% compared to the same quarter last year, to a total of 794,000 as at September 30, 2013. The decrease was mainly due to the up sell of the dual play and triple play bundle services to our TV-only subscribers as well as churn. Among TV-only subscribers, churn came down compared to the previous quarters following our successful campaigns in Q3. However, we expect to continue to experience churn among our TV-only customers as a result of a market moving towards triple-play and increased competition. Churn on all other product lines, and for the All-in-1 bundle in particular, is significantly lower than churn among TV-only subscribers.,” notes the operator.
“We recorded a very strong quarter with the highest sequential growth in net adds since 2010,” said CEO Bernard Dijkhuizen. “The growth in customers subscribing to internet and All-in-1 bundles doubled compared to the previous quarter. Our investments in sales, focus on customer retention and the successful roll-out of the highly popular WifiSpots all contributed to this achievement in the third quarter, which normally is a somewhat softer quarter due to seasonality.
“Customer retention in particular has been the center of our focus. We successfully developed and launched new campaigns and adopted a more targeted marketing approach, on the one hand, while on the other we increased the attractiveness of our products. The internet speed increase for our triple play bundles and broadband internet products (today as high as 150Mbps) and, more importantly, the successful roll-out of WifiSpots, have contributed to a strong increase in the number of subscribers. Since its launch we have activated over 1 million WifiSpots, which quickly gained popularity as is demonstrated by an increasing number of users and data offloaded every day. We will continue to expand the coverage by adding more Wifispots in our footprint.”
“Even though this quarter was very successful in terms of growth of RGUs, we believe that for the foreseeable future the market will remain as competitive as we have seen in the last 6 quarters. At the same time, the high single digit All-in-1 bundle and broadband internet RGU growth in Q3, strong momentum for B2B in the SoHo- and SME-market and the successful launch of Ziggo Mobile will position us strongly for 2014.”
