Sweden’s Com Hem saw continued growth in digital TV RGUs and TiVo customers in Q4 2017.
In its latest set of results, the company says that the former figure increased by 4,000 to 655,000, while the latter grew by 5,000, giving TiVo a penetration of 40%.
Meanwhile, the number of unique consumer subscribers rose by 12,000 to a record high of 983,000 and the broadband RGU total by 14,000 to a record high 750,000.
Consumer ARPU was SEK373, the same as in the third quarter, and consumer churn 13.6% (12.% in Q3).
Looking at Boxer, there was a temporary spike in churn to 19.4% (14.4%), while consumer ARPU rose slightly to SEK301 (SEK298 in Q3). Although 5,000 broadband RGUs were added in the quarter, the number of unique consumers fell by 12,000 (-6,000 in Q3) and RGUs by 8,000 (-6,000 in Q3). Boxer’s fibre footprint was 1,100,000 addressable households, including around 200,000 which did not overlap with the Com Hem segment.
Com Hem’s revenues in Q4 rose by 4.2% to SEK1,389 million (for the group as a whole they were up by 1.4% to SEK1,805 million) EBITDA fell by 1.1% to SEK693 million, while the net result almost tripled to SEK96 million.
In his comments, Anders Nilsson, CEO Com Hem Group, said about the group’s prospects for this year: “In 2018 we will focus on a number of initiatives that we believe will further increase customer satisfaction and financial growth across the group. During Q1 we are executing the bulk of this year’s price adjustments, for the first time including Boxer. As part of our more-for-more strategy we have enhanced our services by, among other things, adding TV channels and on demand content to our portfolio and upgraded the broadband speeds for part of our customer base in 2017. Given that price adjustments will affect a larger portion of the customer base than previous years, we expect the effect on Q1 churn to be higher as well. The rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 will allow higher speeds and increased capacity to future-proof our FibreCoax network. We will launch next generation TV service – the TV Hub and further develop our app-based video services which will help us execute the more-for-more strategy across both of our brands. In addition, we will continue expanding our addressable footprint toward the 3.0m target which will allow us to offer our services to an even larger number of consumers and secure growth for many years to come. Today we reiterate our guidance for 2018 and the mid-term as we aim to deliver mid-single digit underlying EBITDA growth for the entire Group annually. We expect growth to be skewed toward the Com Hem Segment in 2018 as we continue necessary eff orts to execute on the turnaround of Boxer. We expect cCapex for the entire Group to be in the range of SEK1.0-1.1 billion annually. We aim to maintain our leverage within the interval of 3.5-4.0x underlying EBITDA LTM”.
