Swisscom sees modest but solid TV growth in tough market

Swiss service provider Swisscom saw modest but solid growth in its TV base in the third quarter, adding 11,000 new customers, which contributed to an overall rise of 30,000 or 2% in the TV total year-on-year.

The quarter also saw a modest return to growth in fixed broadband, with 3,000 new customers. Overall, Swisscom’s residential broadband base fell by 3,000, or 0.1%, year-on-year.

The company currently has 1.54 million TV customers and 2.027 million retail broadband customers in Switzerland.

Mobile lines were down 0.8% year-on-year to 6.358 million. Swisscom added 31,000 post-paid customers in Q3, contributing to year-on-year growth of 85,000. Lines, but it also lost 136,000 pre-paid customers over the same period.

In fixed telephony, the operator list 27,000 customers in Q3 taking its total to 1.54 million.

In Italy, Fastweb’s broadband access base grew by 3.7% to 2.61 million.

The mixed operational results contributed to a fall in group revenue of 2.7% to CHF5.456 billion (€4.954 billion), with domestic Swiss revenues down 3.3%. Most of the decline was attribtuted to declining prices and the fall in thenumber of fixed line connections.

EBITDA rose by 4% to CHF3.36 billion, but was flat on a like-for-like basis, with Swiss core EBITDA down 1.5%.

The company’s head of sales and services, Marc Werner, is to leave Swisscom to take on a role outside the company. As a result the sales and services and products and marketing divisions will be merged from the beginning of next year as the retail customers division. This will be headed by Dirk Wierzbitzki, the current head of ecommerce outfit PMK.

CEO Urs Schaeppi said that the company had produced “solid results and a good market performance – despite market saturation, tough competition and persistent price pressure in all segments” and cited the fact that “the number of broadband and TV connections grew in the last quarter”.