Website: Rapid TV News
Spain’s main cable operator Ono can celebrate its recent positive economic results in the middle of the current deep crisis.
The company ended last year with a net profit of €50 million compared with losses of €26 million in 2008.
Ono also surpassed its expectations for EBITDA, ending the period with €730 million compared with €701 million for the previous year, a growth of 4.2%.
The forecasts of the company at the beginning of that period were an EBITDA between €680 and €720 million.
However the operator’s revenues went down to €1,510 million, 5.6% less compared with the previous year due to the economic crisis, and an accompanying decrease in telephony and pay-TV consumption.
Ono had 1,902,000 residential subscribers at the end of last year, a decrease of 17,000 clients in relation to the same month the previous year.
But the company’s management are continuing the policy to push the market of triple play clients or combined services of telephony, pay-TV and the internet.
So 36% of its client base asked for these services in Q4 last year, compared with 34% in the same period the previous year.
But the operator registered a strong growth in the number of clients in broadband internet with a total of 1,326,000 at the end of last year, growth of 3.4%, compared with 1,283,000 at the end of the previous year.
So 72.6% of the company’s client base have this type of service.
As for Ono’s pay-TV service, the company had 6.2% fewer clients last year meaning a total of 975,000 subscribers.
This downturn corresponds to the operator’s basic TV services while the premium TV services registered better results in the number of clients.
So the downturn in the number of TV subscribers made the operator bet more on getting new clients to its telephony and broadband services.
As for the operator’s fibre optics network, at the end of last year it had more than 7 million homes connected, an increase of 41,000 homes.
According to Jonathan Cumming, Ono’s financial director the 2009 results “show that in spite of the difficult economic situation last year the company overtook its forecasts in terms of EBITDA, operative cash flow and free cash flow.”
