/* ----------------------------------------------- Comment out annoying Snap... ----------------------------------------------- */

Friday, May 11, 2007

Tiscali UK 1Q2007

The Tiscali Q1 2007 results are in and although not spectacular at least they continue to seem to be making progress.

The UK subs as at 31/3 stood at 1485k of which 437k were unbundled. This is an improvement of 62k net adds and 87k unbundled since 31/12 implying a run rate of around 5k/week and 7k/week respectively.

Perhaps the most disappointing news was that only a further 30 exchanges were unbundled in the 1st Quarter to take the total to 445 exchanges of which 255 could support fully unbundled lines. I’m not sure of the reason for the slow down here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was capex containment related.

The other interesting factoid I learnt about the Tiscali figures is that the customer figures include wholesale as well as retail figures. I was given a ball park figure of 30% for the wholesale base – if any reader knows the exact percentage do not hesitate to use the tittle-tattle line to update me.

Overall in the UK, revenues were €128m for the quarter with EBITDA of just €17.1m, which implies to me that Tiscali need to get their finger out and unbundle more customers to improve the margins. No figures on churn were released, but I guess that this was quite high given the general market trends and that Tiscali never feature highly on any customer care surveys.