Revenue growth on the horizon for UPC

UPC has fought its corner in recent years via its faster-than-the-rest broadband offering. Speeds are still increasing, but now it is also turning to its new weapon, the "next-generation" television platform Horizon, for market momentum.

Mark Coan, vice-president of sales and marketing for UPC Ireland, says the cable company is attracting switchers from satellite at the highest rate in five years, with the result that the rate of new customer subscriptions to its cable digital television products has doubled over the quarter.

This is an industry with a significant element of churn, however, with customers leaving as well as coming in. Figures from parent company Liberty Global show UPC's overall digital cable subscriptions increased more modestly from 335,500 in the second quarter to 336,700 at the end of the third.

When older types of subscriptions – analogue cable and MMDS – are taken into account, UPC Ireland has 430,900 video subscribers, but the number of customers with the two latter “legacy” forms of cable are fast reducing as the company seeks to convert as many of them as possible to its newer packages.

After just a couple of months since its launch, some 9 per cent of UPC’s digital cable subscribers – or 30,000 customers – joined the Horizon platform (which can now be bundled with 120 Mbps broadband) by the end of the third quarter, meaning there is likely still some distance left to run when it comes to upgrading activity.

All this happily points to a continuation of rising average revenue per user patterns at UPC Ireland.

“If you look over the last seven years, on average we have seen double-digit revenue growth,” says Coan. “This is really going well for us.”

Horizon has particular appeal for the more dedicated television watcher, including as it does the ability to record four programmes and watch a fifth simultaneously.