Swisscom sees strong TV growth

Swisscom recorded a year-on-year 55.3% rise in subscribers to its Swisscom TV platform to end September with 556,000 subscribers, including about 17,000 enterprise customers.

The company had a total of 1.635 million retail broadband customers in Switzerland at the end of the third quarter, up 5.3% year-on-year.

The company said it had seen strong take up of its Vivo Casa triple-play offering, and had launched a quad-play service, Vivo Tutto, in August.

Fixed-line losses over the year to September reached 124,000, or 3.8%, which Swisscom attributed to competition from cable.

Residential revenue from Swiss operations amounted to CHF1.291 billion (€1.041 billion) for the quarter, down 3.3%.

Swisscom’s Italian subsidiary Fastweb saw quarterly net revenues fall by 10.6% year-on-year to €420 million, with sales of products to residential customers falling sharply, partly as a result of the introduction of stricter credit checks.

Litigation with a rival telecom provider was settled in September, resulting in 197,000 customers being transferred to the other provider. Fastweb ended the year to September with 1.56 million residential broadband customers, up 45,000 year-on-year excluding the transfer. Fastweb had signed up a total of 37,000 customers to its new bundled satellite TV and broadband offering with Sky Italia by the end of September, including 18,000 signed up in the third quarter.

Swisscom posted revenues of CHF8.5 billion for the first nine months of the year, down 4.9%, and net income of CHF1.5 billion, up 8.4%.