Record rise in new business for UPC

COMMUNICATIONS AND home entertainment company UPC Ireland added a record number of subscriptions in the third quarter, with a net gain of almost 32,000 “revenue-generating units” from June to September.

This is the largest quarterly gain in business that the company has made, it says.

UPC now has 858,000 subscriptions in Ireland, up 13 per cent on last year. As households may have more than one subscription with the company, the actual number of customers is fewer, at 531,000.

UPC Ireland chief executive Dana Strong said its €400 million investment in high-bandwidth broadband had helped it maintain “a strong presence” in the market.

Its broadband subscriptions increased by 31 per cent on last year and it now has 241,400 broadband subscribers. Home-phone subscriptions grew 65 per cent to 143,800.

Growth in its longer-standing digital TV business was more modest, at 3 per cent, taking its subscriber numbers up to 384,900, some 10,000 higher than this time last year. Over the quarter it added two new channels, the Food Network and True Movies.

UPC said its broadband network investment programme would also benefit the home entertainment part of its business, allowing consumers to “push the frontiers of technology”.

Its rival in the home entertainment market, Sky, had 600,000 subscribers in Ireland as of the start of 2011.

Last year UPC launched an aggressive marketing campaign to poach customers from Sky and phone provider Eircom for its bundled package of TV, broadband and phone services.

At the time, UPC said it had poached 70,000 customers from Sky over the previous 12 months. This is the first time since Sky entered the Irish market in the early 1990s that UPC has been winning back customers.

UPC parent company Liberty Global secured revenue of $2.61 billion (€1.9 billion) in the quarter ending September 30th, up 4 per cent on the same period last year.

UPC’s strategy across Europe mirrors its approach in Ireland, where it has focused on increasing broadband speeds and selling product “bundles” to customers.