UK ISP Sky Broadband Tops 5.75 Million Internet Subscribers

Sky has today published the company’s latest results for Q3 2015, which reveals that their Sky Broadband division in the UK and Ireland added another +133,000 Internet subscribers in the quarter to total more than 5.75 million (up from the +96,000 added during Q2).

It’s perhaps fair to say that Sky has had a busy few months, not least due to an on-going fight with BT over Ofcom’s Strategic Review (here) / Pay TV and the tentative launch of their new 940Mbps capable FTTP broadband network in the city of York (here). On top of that they’ve followed the other big ISPs by raising their prices, which is rarely a popular move (here).

Never the less today’s results show that Sky are continuing to hold their own, although it’s normal to see an uptick in new subscriber additions during Q3 as the previous Q2 period often suffers a slump due to student movements (i.e. cancelling contracts as they move back home) and holiday periods.

Jeremy Darroch, Sky’s Group CEO, said:

“We have made a strong start to the year with customers responding well to the quality and breadth of our content, products and services. As we continue to place customers right at the heart of our business, we are focused on offering the very best content at the same time as anticipating customers’ evolving needs, delivering the programmes that they love across multiple platforms and devices.

This approach has delivered an excellent financial performance in the quarter, with further broad-based revenue growth of 6%, translating into a 10% increase in operating profit. This performance was driven by strong demand across the group.

We added over 130,000 new customers in the quarter, up 7% on the previous year, which means that we’ve added almost a million new customers over the past twelve months, up 51% year on year. Our total product base now exceeds 54 million, and within this, broadband growth in the UK had a stand-out performance this quarter, up 77% year on year.”

Going forward Sky will no doubt be keeping a watchful eye on the Strategic Review, which could have an impact on their business, and they also plan to launch a new consumer mobile service in the UK during 2016 via O2’s MVNO platform (here).

Sadly Sky’s results, which earlier this year were consolidated and simplified into an incredibly vague form following the merger with Sky Italia (Italy) and Sky Deutschland (Germany), don’t give us a lot of detail. But we do learn that their UK Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) remains stuck at £47 per month and Churn was similarly unchanged at 9.8%.