Boss of Sky UK Warns of Scope for Future Price Rises

As a CEO there are probably some things you shouldn’t say so soon after leaving your customers reeling from another round of price rises (here). Never the less Sky’s boss, Jeremy Darroch, has warned that growing competition from BT and Netflix won’t stop it raising prices again.

In fairness Darroch, who was giving a speech to Morgan Stanley’s annual industry conference, happened to be talking more in the context of their Pay TV products than broadband or phone services.

Never the less many Sky Broadband customers also take Sky’s TV and phone products and they’ve only just been hit with one price hike last month, thus now might not be the best time to talk about future increase. But that hasn’t stopped Darroch.

Jeremy Darroch said (Reuters):

“The opportunity for pricing is good and it is certainly our intention in the UK to do that (raise prices), [but] we want to do that behind innovation, behind improved service, behind improved content.”

Generally speaking Sky has had a good few quarters in the UK and they’ve continued to grow at a time when some analysts had been expecting them to suffer as a result of rising competition (e.g. BTSport, Netflix etc.), but this hasn’t happened. Mind you part of that is probably due to the big discounts they’ve been offering.

On the other hand annual price hikes are nothing new and affect the whole market, yet it remains to be seen whether Darroch is expecting even more dramatic rises in the future or merely more of the same. It’s probably the latter and this may merely be more about pandering to investors.