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Virgin Media seeks edge by running tactical race
Within days of Liberty Global chief executive Mike Fries describing its £15bn takeover of Virgin Media as an essential “grow or die” strategy, the UK business scrapped 600 top and middle management posts in its first major move under new ownership to create a leaner, meaner operation to battle rivals including BSkyB.
The acquisition marked the fulfilment of a decade-long ambition for American cable tycoon John Malone’s Liberty Global, beginning with an attempt to merge NTL and Telewest at the beginning of the last decade. Later, after they did merge to form Virgin Media, an earlier takeover move failed in 2007.
Fries said at the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge convention this month that the huge comparative reach of broadcasters such as Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB, and the more recent rise of a new wave of internet players, meant the deal had become imperative to ensure that Virgin Media, and Liberty Global, survived. “You think about who we compete with: national public service broadcasters, national mobile platforms, national satellite platforms like Sky, increasingly international platforms like YouTube or Netflix,” he said. “So as a small cable operator, we only reach half of UK homes … we need to build scale. If we don’t build scale, we don’t survive.”
When the plan to axe managers was announced, Virgin Media chief executive Tom Mockridge, the former head of Sun and Times publisher News UK and previously of Sky Italia, said that it would make the business “fit for growth”. But Virgin Media is not growing on many of the measures that City analysts and investors judge businesses by.
In the second quarter of 2013 it lost 16,300 TV customers – although the company points out it added 5,000 extra pay-TV subscribers – and lost 3,200 internet subscribers. Revenues remained flat year on year at £1.03bn.
However, the City does not expect big customer growth, says Andrew Hogley, telecoms analyst at Espirito Santo Investment Bank. “Virgin Media’s business model is milking more revenue per user out of a solid base.”
To this end average revenue per customer has grown by £1.60 year on year to £48.80, and operating cash flow continues to grow. And 1.7 million, or 44%, of its 3.8 million TV subscribers are now on its YouView-competitor, TiVo-powered set-top box. This is growth of almost 750,000 in a year.
In the all-important race against rivals to offer customers bundled TV, phone and broadband services – a strategy BT has latched onto, buying Premier League rights to move into pay-TV and protect its broadband base, and that BSkyB increasingly espouses now that TV growth has flatlined – Virgin Media can claim that an impressive 65.6% of its 4.9 million customers take three products.
“A lesser part of growth will come from connecting more and more homes,” Fries admitted. “The largest part of our growth will come from getting those connected homes to do more with us. A function of providing more value to them. [For example] putting BT Sport on for free, making sure [customers] have access to all sports channels available in the market, putting Netflix into the TiVo box, doubling broadband speeds.”
As for content, Fries doesn’t buy in to the mantra that Netflix, with its headline-grabbing tactics such as backing Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards, is a harbinger of the death of traditional TV. “We think it is a nice complement to the existing programme offering,” he said. “For people who want content and love content Netflix will never be enough for them. We’re not threatened by it.”
On the subject of threats, Hogley says Virgin Media doesn’t need to worry so much about bleeding customers to BT and BSkyB – which is why it has largely “sat on the sidelines” in their increasingly acrimonious war, and why it could comfortably do a deal with BT to offer its sports channels.
“As long as they can get access to all the content people want to watch it is not a problem,” he says. “The BT Sport deal was something they absolutely needed to do. BT wasn’t losing customers to Virgin Media, Sky is the problem, so they don’t have to worry about winning them back.”
The biggest ace up Virgin Media’s sleeve is superfast broadband – heavily pushed by the company, using ads featuring Olympics and World sprint champion Usain Bolt – which is taken by 2.8 million of its 4.3 million internet customers. A year ago just 1.3 million had signed up for 30Mb+ packages.
Yet Hogley believes that this selling point is arguably not as important to consumers as the company thinks. “Virgin has had a competitive advantage on speed, but for the 30Mb level that fills most consumers’ needs today, rivals can also fulfil that,” he argues. “People want more than 5Mb to 8Mb but it is hard to see who needs 100Mb. That need is a few years away yet, from 2017/18 they will have a strategic advantage in speed again.”
Liberty Global’s stock has recently received a boost on speculation that Vodafone might look to snap the company up, following the £84bn sale of its stake in Verizon, to add to its £6.5bn deal for Kabel Deutschland which was cleared by regulators on Friday.
Fries said that Vodafone’s move into cable is an important endorsement of Liberty Global’s strategy, but cautions against expecting it to be the UK mobile company’s next target.
“Vodafone’s investment in Germany is a massive validation of Virgin Media’s business model,” he said. “It is a validation of the connectivity business we are in. We don’t need to make any more acquisitions to grow, to have a great business, we’re not reliant on that. We’re not expecting to be bought or to buy anything further at this point. We are opportunistic about it.”
Mark Sweney theguardian.com