BSkyB has announced an in increase in revenues of Stg£470 million, an increase of 20 per cent despite shrinking advertising markets.
In its end-of-year results published this morning, the company, which has 245,000 subscribers in Ireland, said its operating costs had increased by Stg£438 million to Stg£2.58bn, with total revenues of Stg£2.77 billion resulting in net operating profits of Stg£192 million.
Sky generated positive free cashflow in the quarter and in the year. As the peak level of net debt of Stg£1.83bn was reached on 31 December 2001, the company also announced, net debt was reduced by Stg£305 million to Stg£1.5bn.
Sky's principal revenue generator - direct-to-home(DTH)services - which account for 69 per cent of total turnover, increased by 26 per cent to £1.9bn.
This, the company said, was the product of a 14 per cent increase in the average number of DTH subscribers(648,000) pushing the total number of subscribers in Britain and Ireland over the six million mark.
Excluding pay-per-view events,(particularly the Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson fight) earnings from single households rose to £333 (excluding pay-per-view revenues from the Lewis-Tyson boxing match to reflect the 'one-off' nature of this event).
An increase in the average number of cable subscribers taking Sky's basic channels Sky News and Sky One was offset by the continued decline in the average number of premium channels taken by cable subscribers.
Advertising revenue also decreased by 7 per cent to £251 million, as a result of the overall downturn in the UK advertising market.
Interactive revenues increased by 100% to £186 million in total, of which £95 million related to betting via interactive television, the Internet and the telephone.
Surrey Sports, Sky's wholly-owned bookmaker, now has 93,000 interactive TV betting registrations and receives over 60,000 bets per week on average.