Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...

[weesteev]

Sustainable revenue growth and operating leverage driving strong free cash flow

Revenue growth in all areas; total up 5.7% to £982m
OCF1 up 7.6% to £376m
- Operating income up 58.9% to £111m
FCF2 more than doubled to £100m
- Net cash provided by operating activities up 34.3% to £272m
Good operational performance through quality customergrowth

Quality of customer base continues to improve
- Launch of 30Mb broadband tier has transformed acquisition mix
- 39% of new broadband customers taking 20Mb tier or higher, up from 15% in Q1-10
- Broadband revolution gains pace, with world's fastest cable trial of 1.5Gb
- Premium TV customers increased 22%; HD penetration increased to 41%
- 65,000 pre-registered for next-generation TiVo TV; now available to new customers
- Q1 cable ARPU3 up 2.6% to £46.16

Cable customers up 1.2% in last twelve months with 20,200 net additions in Q1

Mobile contract customers up 22.6% to 1.3m
- Contract customers in cable homes up 19% to 0.8m

Business revenues up 13.7% to £159m
- New contract win with London Borough of Lambeth

Capital Return programme continued
Repurchased 7.2m shares in Q1; 18.8m shares to-date
Plan to retire $550m of debt due 2016 with cash on hand, further reducing debt and interest expense

All good new surely?

[DABhand]

Sorry to be pessimistic but its all positives, where is the negatives also :P

Like for example they may have increased sales by 1.2%, by how many new or current customers left in the first 3 months?

What about the fact they oversold in some area's?

How much of a pay rise did the CEO get for his smash and grab approach?


I am not trying to demean your post, but I never trust a fully positive Quarterly report from any company, makes it look like they are hiding something :P

[carlwaring]

Originally Posted by DABhand

Sorry to be pessimistic but its all positives, where is the negatives also

Perhaps there aren't any?

Like for example they may have increased sales by 1.2%, by how many new or current customers left in the first 3 months?

Their churn is quite low; around 12-2% IIRC. They think they do list gross and net figures in the full details.

What about the fact they oversold in some area's?

Fact quoted by VM or just heresay?

How much of a pay rise did the CEO get...

Who cares and what business is it of yours?

I am not trying to demean your post...

No. You just take any opportunity to have another swipe at VM for no good reason.

[DABhand]

Ok time to again try to answer you calmly.

1. Nothing is perfect, to declare yourself perfect is to make you imperfect.

2. I am guessing you meant 1.2-2%, but the fact remains like most companies with quarterly or annual reports they will always give the initial sales percentage before the decrease of losses is added to the equation.

3. Fact, from various forums, news reports and so forth. It is well known they oversubscribed the 50mb service in highly populated student areas like Newcastle and parts of Manchester.

4. Because it is interesting to know, and my business as it relates to the services I am paying for, am I paying for a business whose CEO is grabbing at cash at any opportunity, like any customer they would want to know the nature of the CEO.

5. No Carl, not a swipe at all, infact you are having swipes at my posts.

[Robertus]

Originally Posted by DABhand

Sorry to be pessimistic but its all positives, where is the negatives also :P

Like for example they may have increased sales by 1.2%, by how many new or current customers left in the first 3 months?

What about the fact they oversold in some area's?

How much of a pay rise did the CEO get for his smash and grab approach?


I am not trying to demean your post, but I never trust a fully positive Quarterly report from any company, makes it look like they are hiding something :P

Oversold? Well duh, sorry to say that they're a business. As much as I don't like it that's what they do.

Could I repeat, as has been requested by other mods in other threads, that we try to reduce the bickering.

[weesteev]

Originally Posted by DABhand

Ok time to again try to answer you calmly.

1. Nothing is perfect, to declare yourself perfect is to make you imperfect.

2. I am guessing you meant 1.2-2%, but the fact remains like most companies with quarterly or annual reports they will always give the initial sales percentage before the decrease of losses is added to the equation.

3. Fact, from various forums, news reports and so forth. It is well known they oversubscribed the 50mb service in highly populated student areas like Newcastle and parts of Manchester.

4. Because it is interesting to know, and my business as it relates to the services I am paying for, am I paying for a business whose CEO is grabbing at cash at any opportunity, like any customer they would want to know the nature of the CEO.

5. No Carl, not a swipe at all, infact you are having swipes at my posts.

1. - What has this to do with the topic?

2. - The actual churn rate was 1.2% up slightly from 1.1% the year before. This figure is customer loss only and has nothing to do with sales.

3. - Incorrect

4. - The CEO's salary is declared yearly to the NYSE, his salary is pretty modest considering the size of the company and its current turnover and 7 quarters of positive cash flow.

5. - Quit the bickering

[DABhand]

All due respect from scotsman to another. You have misread the points wrongly.

1. Was an answer to Carl's question.

2. Again was repeating what Carl had said when he said 12-2% I assumed he meant 1.2-2%.

3. Not incorrect at all, it was prolific in the support forums for weeks. Talk about street cabs being overused etc. Plenty of customer irate over the speeds during offpeak hours due to the massive heavy load. Even had someone from VM come on and say yes there was a oversubscription problem.

4. Yeah, hence why I was asking would be good to see the increase from last year to this year.

5. All due respect without sounding bad, that is the moderators job to tell people.

[weesteev]

Originally Posted by DABhand

3. Not incorrect at all, it was prolific in the support forums for weeks. Talk about street cabs being overused etc. Plenty of customer irate over the speeds during offpeak hours due to the massive heavy load. Even had someone from VM come on and say yes there was a oversubscription problem.

No Incorrect, you highlighted Manchester and Newcastle which don't have anything like the same problems that Plymouth and Exeter have. Just because a couple of people complain on a forum about speeds/capacity, doesn't actually mean there's a problem.

Manchester is made up of 6 legacy network areas for example, to say that Manchester has problems is like saying that Scotland has a capacity problem. The network is extensive with many 10's of thousands of distribution points and 100's of Nodal areas.

Oversubscription is a myth, lack of capacity is the reality due to problems with legacy network builds.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by weesteev

Oversubscription is a myth, lack of capacity is the reality due to problems with legacy network builds.

What a bizarre statement. There's a lack of capacity given the amount of subscribers - surely that would suggest they are oversubscribed?

This also doesn't roll - there are areas which are running on full DOCSIS 2 and have problems. Requiring node splits isn't a problem with legacy network builds it's business as usual.

It's not an uncommon thing for cable networks to have a minority of nodes which are oversubscribed but to call it a myth is somewhat

[carlwaring]

Originally Posted by DABhand

1. Nothing is perfect, to declare yourself perfect is to make you imperfect.

Except, of course, no-one has ever, ever, ever claimed that VM is "perfect" .

2. I am guessing you meant 1.2-2%,

My sincere apologies to al. Could have sworn I had corrected that. I actually meant "1-2%". (Been out all PM so have not been able to correct it sooner!)

[weesteev]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

What a bizarre statement. There's a lack of capacity given the amount of subscribers - surely that would suggest they are oversubscribed?

This also doesn't roll - there are areas which are running on full DOCSIS 2 and have problems. Requiring node splits isn't a problem with legacy network builds it's business as usual.

It's not an uncommon thing for cable networks to have a minority of nodes which are oversubscribed but to call it a myth is somewhat

Over Subscribed suggests that the connected node has been oversold, the issue is over utilisation, this can vary depending on node size. You can have a legacy build 500 home node with 200 active customers and high utilisation due to heavy downloading (student area for example). Would you call that over subscription as the node design and capacity planning have allowed for 500 customers and the issue is high use.

I don't agree with the term over subscription, is very often over used on this forum with no real understanding behind its meaning.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by weesteev

Over Subscribed suggests that the connected node has been oversold, the issue is over utilisation, this can vary depending on node size. You can have a legacy build 500 home node with 200 active customers and high utilisation due to heavy downloading (student area for example). Would you call that over subscription as the node design and capacity planning have allowed for 500 customers and the issue is high use.

I don't agree with the term over subscription, is very often over used on this forum with no real understanding behind its meaning.

In your case you gave not so much however I would also say there are most certainly areas which are oversubscribed - for example areas with over 100 20 and 50Mbit modems on a single 3.2MHz upstream and in turn a similar amount of uplifted modems on a 6.4MHz upstream.

If you're talking about legacy build nodes it should be noted that those nodes were built with certain services in mind, the case could be made that as VM introduce more demanding services onto the nodes they should be performing commensurate upgrades to those nodes in order to increase the bandwidth per home passed.

TLDR legacy node sizes are no excuse, when the original company built that 2000 home node that's been split into 500 home areas they didn't build it with the services that VM are running in mind. Splitting nodes both to account for uptake, usage and upgraded services is a BAU activity. When areas fall below VM's capacity guidelines for bandwidth per customer this is a failure on the part of capacity planning at VM and oversubscribed by their own criteria.

I appreciate that I'm discussing how things were when I was with ntl, I know Telewest's approach both to capacity planning and upgrade was different and am not sure which the company is now following.

[DABhand]

I was going to point out that steev's "Oversubscription is a myth, lack of capacity.." comment but Igni did that already.

If there is a lack of capacity and there is too many customers on each node, then it is oversubscribed, or if you want to use a different word Overpopulated.

---------- Post added at 05:28 ---------- Previous post was at 05:26 ----------

Originally Posted by carlwaring

Except, of course, no-one has ever, ever, ever claimed that VM is "perfect" .

You said when referring to my post saying where is the negatives? You said "Perhaps there isn't any" to which I pointed out, nothing is perfect there will always be negatives with positives.

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by DABhand

I was going to point out that steev's "Oversubscription is a myth, lack of capacity.." comment but Igni did that already.

If there is a lack of capacity and there is too many customers on each node, then it is oversubscribed, or if you want to use a different word Overpopulated.

But it's perfectly possible to have a node under subscribed but over utilised, people will then wrongly come to the forum complaining how they're on an over subscribed node when infact they aren't.

This is a contended service, if the node is below the level of contention then it is not oversubscribed, however it can be over utilised if the people on that node are using bandwidth above and beyond what the contention levels permit.