Millicom Cable RGUs up 5.9% in 2015
Wednesday, February 10th, 20167.6 million homes passed – 5.4 million RGU’s; 143,000 new Home RGUs
LUXEMBOURG — Millicom has announced results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2015.
The rapid expansion of our cable footprint has seen the fixed Home business outperform strongly, growing 18% in the quarter.
We have a clear operational roadmap for 2016 aimed at achieving a leadership role in fixed-mobile services. Looking ahead, highlights will include rolling out 4G in Paraguay, satellite pay-TV launch in Colombia and the introduction of Tivo across all our Latin American countries.
Cable
Cable and Digital Media revenue grew at 17.8%. UNE has started to grow strongly, up 11.4% year-on-year this quarter (service revenue +12.0%). Total revenue generating units (“RGUs”) increased by 143,000 from Q3 2015 to 5.39 million with the growth coming from TV offers and fixed broadband solutions.
Our cable footprint expanded by 133,000 to 7.6 million homes passed. The number of RGUs per household (HFC) increased to 1.88x from 1.80x a year ago. More than 56% of our households were double or triple play, around 3 percentage points more than one year ago. The ARPU per Home Connected in Q4 was $26.0, flat quarter on quarter in dollar terms but up 11% year-on-year in local currency.
Colombia
During this year we have focused on rebuilding some of the network to provide HFC services to our key markets and have increased our footprint by 341,000 new homes (64,000 in Q4).
Guatemala
Cable revenue was up 70.4%, with the Tigo Star brand continuing to gain traction and with an ARPU per home connected up 10.8%.
Paraguay
Cable grew by 22.8% with ARPU and the customer base increasing.
Honduras
Cable grew by 11.7% mostly driven by footprint expansion.
Bolivia
Q4 revenue grew by 8.4% to $140 million with mobile revenue up 4.4% (data up 63%) and Cable up 57%.
El Salvador
Cable revenue increased by 8.7% on volume with limited ARPU growth (up 1.0%).
Costa Rica
Revenue was up 18.1% to $41 million with RGUs growing 6% year-on-year. The EBITDA margin was 40%, down from 44% a year earlier on higher programming costs resulting from a more aggressive Digital and HD TV penetration strategy.
Q4 15 – Latin America – KPIs (‘000)
Q4 2015 Q3 2015 Q2 2015 Q1 2015 Q4 2014 % change* ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- --------- Cable RGUs** 5,393 5,251 5,239 5,178 5,091 5.9
* % change is reported year-on-year change. Adjusted by 72,000 clean-up of UNE inactive customer base in Q3 2015.
** HFC (includes copper lines of UNE)
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