New Zealand - SKY Television Announces 2007 Annual Result

SKY Network Television Limited (“SKY”) announced today the result for the year ended 30 June 2007, being a net profit after tax of $77.9 million, a 29% increase over the comparative period for last year.

The SKY Board has declared a fully imputed final dividend of 5 cents per share, giving a total dividend for the year of 10 cents. This is a 25% increase over last years total dividend of 8 cents per share.

John Fellet, SKY Chief Executive said, “SKY has had another excellent year, continuing to show gains across all key areas including growth in subscriber numbers, increased average revenue earned per subscriber and a continued reduction in churn. We have also been pleased with the performance of our free-to-air channel, Prime, which has continued to grow its share of the television audience”.

SKY’s subscriber base grew by 43,941 (6.6%) subscribers over the previous year, to a new high of 711,211. The subscriber base comprises 529,830 residential digital subscribers (74%), 53,679 residential UHF subscribers (8%), 113,961 wholesale subscribers (16%) and 13,741 (2%) commercial and other subscribers. SKY is now in 44.5% of New Zealand homes.

Churn, the percentage of subscribers who disconnect their service, continues to fall with gross churn down from 13.5% for the June 2006 year to 13.4% in June 2007, continuing to clearly demonstrate the strength of SKY’s channels and programmes.

The last year saw the launch of four new channels; MTV, the Documentary Channel, FOX News Channel and the Hindi general entertainment channel, STAR PLUS, all of which contributed to an 11.5% increase in SKY’s share of total television viewing.

Highlights over the last year were the successful launch of the new Optus D1 satellite and the transition of services from the old Optus B1 satellite to D1 in November 2006 and the launch of mobile video services on the Vodafone 3G network in February 2007

Looking ahead, SKY is continuing to progress its plans to launch a second generation MY SKY decoder incorporating high definition television, IPTV capability and additional hard drive storage capacity. We are expecting these decoders to be available at the end of the 2008 financial year.

As of yesterday, Sky Television’s subscriber count was 714,664.

More: SKY Investor Relations