Liberty Global Reports Fiscal 2008 Results
Monday, February 23rd, 2009ENGLEWOOD, Colorado — Liberty Global, Inc. (“Liberty Global,” “LGI,” or the “Company”) (NASDAQ: LBTYA, LBTYB and LBTYK), today announces financial and operating results for the fourth quarter (“Q4”) and year ended December 31, 2008.
Subscriber Statistics
At December 31, 2008, we provided our 16.9 million customers a total of 26.5 million services, consisting of 15.6 million video, 6.2 million broadband internet and 4.7 million telephony RGUs. During the fourth quarter, we grew our subscriber base by 1.3 million RGUs, including 284,000 organic additions. This organic growth compares to an average of 255,000 organic additions over the previous three quarters of 2008. For the year ended December 31, 2008, we added 2.4 million subscribers, including 1.0 million organic RGU additions, and as a result, achieved a 10% increase to our RGU base in 2008.
A key driver of our 2008 RGU results was growth in our advanced services. For both the quarter and year ended December 31, 2008, we achieved record organic advanced service subscriber gains, adding 839,000 and 2.8 million RGUs, respectively. This growth meaningfully contributed to our bundled penetration rates at December 31, 2008, as 38% of our customers subscribed to two or more products, of which approximately half were tripleplay customers. As compared to 2007, we increased our triple-play customer base by 27% or 681,000 customers, and overall, we increased our total bundled customer base by 18% or 994,000 customers. During the fourth quarter, video competition continued to impact our business, as we experienced an organic loss of 54,000 video RGUs. Nonetheless, comparing our fourth quarter results to the prior three quarters of 2008, our organic video RGU loss in Europe was the lowest of the year. This was largely a result of improvements in our Austrian, Polish and Czech video businesses.
With 501,000 organic RGU additions during Q4, digital video, including both digital cable and DTH, remained our strongest growing business line for the seventh consecutive quarter. Digital cable performed especially well, generating a record 468,000 organic RGU additions in the fourth quarter. With 1.4 million organic RGU additions in 2008, digital cable growth improved by more than 50% as compared to 2007, driven by notable improvements in the Netherlands, Austria, our central and eastern European (“CEE”) markets and VTR. As a result, our digital cable penetration10 increased from 25% to 36% in the last twelve months. We also experienced the growing success of our DVR, HD and VoD products as we continue to expand these services across our footprint. In the Netherlands, nearly 50% of our digital customer base subscribes to our DVR and/or HD services and in Japan, we increased the HD-DVR subscriber base by 59% year-over-year.
Consolidated Operating Data (video) – December 31, 2008:
Subscribers ---------------------------------------- Total Analog Digital Video Cable Cable DTH MMDS Homes --------- --------- --------- ------- ---------- UPC Broadband Division: The Netherlands 1,396,400 648,000 -- -- 2,044,400 Switzerland 1,209,100 347,000 -- -- 1,556,100 Austria 383,300 171,700 -- -- 555,000 Ireland 217,000 233,100 -- 87,200 537,300 Total Western Europe 3,205,800 1,399,800 -- 87,200 4,692,800 Hungary 593,900 79,400 183,000 -- 856,300 Romania 998,200 109,900 155,300 -- 1,263,400 Poland 941,400 79,100 -- -- 1,020,500 Czech Republic 265,200 294,000 121,700 -- 680,900 Slovakia 225,400 29,300 31,500 5,500 291,700 Slovenia 147,200 10,000 -- 4,000 161,200 Total Central and Eastern Europe 3,171,300 601,700 491,500 9,500 4,274,000 Total UPC Broadband Division 6,377,100 2,001,500 491,500 96,700 8,966,800 Telenet (Belgium) 1,728,900 673,600 -- -- 2,402,500 J:COM (Japan) 560,000 1,997,000 -- -- 2,557,000 The Americas: VTR (Chile) 532,700 345,200 -- -- 877,900 Puerto Rico -- 83,800 -- -- 83,800 Total The Americas 532,700 429,000 -- -- 961,700 Austar (Australia) -- 2,700 717,500 -- 720,200 --------- --------- --------- ------- ---------- Grand Total 9,198,700 5,103,800 1,209,000 96,700 15,608,200
More: Earnings Release
Latest News
- Netflix posts first quarter 2024 results and outlook
- Graham Media Group selects Bitmovin Playback
- Dialog, Axiata Group, Bharti Airtel agree on merger in Sri Lanka
- Yahoo brings identity solutions to CTV
- Plex has largest FAST line-up with 1,112 channels
- TV3 migrates from on-prem servers to AWS Cloud with Redge