Virgin Media UK Report Quarterly Fall in Broadband Subscribers to 4.475m

Cable operator Virgin Media (Liberty Global) have today reported their latest Q2-2013 financial results, which revealed that its total broadband ISP subscriber base had shrunk by -15,500 in the last quarter (down from +25.5k in Q1-2013 and +51.6k in Q4-2012) to total 4,475,000.

The decline is actually fairly common around this time of year and often occurs as a result of students cancelling their contracts when they move back home for the summer. Virgin Media often offer shorter term packages for students and as a result they’re usually hit harder than most by the start of summer holidays.

However most of the decline came from their slower non-cable Virgin National (Virgin.net/ADSL2+) based broadband users, which fell from 180,900 last quarter to 168,600 now (-12,300). The figure is roughly unchanged from the -11,900 lost during Q1 and unsurprisingly Virgin Media hid this information deep within their results (hard to find).

By comparison Virgin Media’s cable (DOCSIS / EuroDOCSIS 3.0) platform had a total of 4,306,400 broadband subscribers and only lost -3,500 in the quarter.

Tom Mockridge, Virgin Medias CEO, said:

“Nearly one and a half million more homes are now getting superfast broadband of 30Mb plus from us than twelve months ago. And there’s demand for even faster speeds with over 40% of our new subscribers choosing 60Mb or higher in the last quarter. By doubling more than four million customers’ speeds since early last year we’ve also helped the UK shoot 14 places up the global rankings, overtaking the US, France and Germany.

The improvements we’re making to customer service are also becoming apparent as we topped the most recent Ofcom satisfaction study. This combination of extra customers and an increase in the average they’re spending with us over the year continues to drive our revenue and performance.”

Overall Virgin Media’s double speed upgrade has meant that some 2.8 million (64%) cable broadband subscribers now take one of their superfast broadband (30Mbps to 120Mbps) connections, which is up from 58% in the previous quarter.

Interestingly it’s noted that their cable network now passes 12,490,200 homes in the United Kingdom, which is up by +10,100 from 12,480,100 one year ago. In reality that just means their network coverage has remained broadly unchanged bar a few small improvements.

Finally Virgin Media noted that its revenues had declined slightly from £1,043m in Q1 to £1,027m now.