Vague Results from Sky Reveal Confusing UK Broadband Performance

Sky Plc (Sky Broadband) has today released the first batch of consolidated Q4-2014 (calendar) results since they merged Sky Italia (Italy) and Sky Deutschland (Germany) into the fold last year. But unfortunately this appears to have come at the cost of any useful data on their broadband and phone operations in the United Kingdom.

Normally at this point in the calendar we’d be bringing our readers a nice little summary of Sky’s performance over the past quarter, including details about their unbundled lines, network coverage and so forth. But sadly those days could now be over as the new consolidated results appear to do their level best to hide any meaningful broadband and phone data.

So far the best bit of information that we’ve been able to find is a vague mention of how their TV growth more than doubled to 202,000 and broadband saw “good growth” with 106,000 additions in the quarter (is that net additions? we’re not sure). Sadly Sky also includes the republic of Ireland in these statistics (Note to Sky: that’s a different country) and so we’re unsure where the actual net additions for the UK alone stand.

Sky’s prior results for Q3-2014 (calendar) were much more informative and revealed that the group, at least with respect to the United Kingdom, had performed well to add +75,000 home broadband customers in Q3 2014 (up from +50k in Q2 and +70k in Q1 2014) to total 5,322,000. So we can at least guess from today’s report that this figure must now stand at around 5.4 million, at least until somebody in their PR team responds to clarify.

Jeremy Darroch, CEO of Sky Plc, said:

“The strength of our performance in the UK and Ireland shows that our approach to segmenting the market with the complementary Sky and NOW TV brands is working. Across the board, customers are responding to our investment in more high-quality TV and innovative new services. This has resulted in the highest customer growth in nine years, the highest total product growth in four years and the lowest churn in a decade.

Alongside our continued strength in the UK and Ireland, the acquisition of Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland gives us an expanded opportunity for growth. Both businesses had a strong quarter, Germany posting its highest ever customer growth and Italy showing resilience with good customer growth in a challenging economic environment. Integration is progressing well and we are excited about the potential for the three businesses to be even stronger together.

Six months into the year, we’ve seen a good performance right across the new Sky. We have world-class capability within the expanded business and a strong set of plans that mean we are well placed to deliver growth and returns for shareholders.”

In the meantime, while we wait for Sky to clarify a more detailed set of KPI’s for the United Kingdom and hopefully independent of other countries (call us old fashioned, but we like it that way), Sky does state that their monthly ARPU for the UK and Ireland now stands at £47 and quarterly churn sits at 9.2%.

Meanwhile Sky’s Roku-based over-the-top UK streaming service NOW TV is said to have “enjoyed a record quarter of growth boosted by the success of partnerships with retailers like Dixons Carphone and new commercial partnerships with companies including Google and Vodafone“, although they don’t provide any numbers to support that claim.

The full results can be read here and hopefully Sky will improve the data provided in future quarters.

UPDATE 9:24am

Sky has responded to say that they don’t know how many broadband subscribers they have in the United Kingdom. Good accounting.