One to watch: Revenue increases at Virgin Media Ireland
REVENUE at Virgin Media Ireland increased by 7pc last year to €446m.
At year-end the group – which counts Niall Quinn among its sports pundits – had 1,080,000 cable and mobile subscriptions, an overall organic increase of just over 2pc. The growth was broadly based across mobile, business-to-business, Virgin Media TV and cable broadband, through investment in expanding its network.
In its mobile division, subscribers grew by 63pc to 81,500 customers.
Virgin Media Ireland CEO Tony Hanway said: “Our strategy of focusing relentlessly on customer service and quality has seen us post excellent year-onyear growth as the Virgin Media brand continues to go from strength-to-strength in Ireland.
“At Virgin Media Television we also saw very strong revenue performance helped by audience growth across both traditional channels and on-demand services.”
The group, whose cable packages includes crime drama ‘Luther’, is owned by US cable pioneer John Malone’s Liberty Global, which also had results out yesterday.
Income from continuing operations at Liberty Global increased 10pc to $839m (€737m) for the year.
Elsewhere, Liberty announced the sale of UPC Switzerland to Sunrise Communications for a total enterprise value of CHF 6.3bn (€5.5bn). Sunrise will pay Liberty CHF 2.6bn (€2.3bn) in cash, and assume CHF3.6bn (€3.2bn) of UPC’s debt.
Liberty, which is listed in the US, is also awaiting EU approval for its sale of its assets in Germany and Eastern Europe to Vodafone for $21.8bn.