Liberty Global posts $100m profit for Q2

Liberty Global has reported healthy growth for its second quarter, boosting revenues by 11% to $5.07 billion, with profits lifting to $101.1 million.

Although the numbers were seemingly lower than investors expected, the performance marks a turnaround from the same period in 2015, which saw a loss of $464 million. Western Europe continued to dominate the figures for the company, now accounting for almost 95% of total revenues, as the UK and Germany posted strong quarters. The company has been investing heavily to expand in recent months, and received positive news from the European Commission this week in the form of a green light for a proposed merger with Vodafone in the Netherlands.

“As we continue to put the building blocks of Liberty Go in place, we are starting to see the first evidence of success with the acceleration of our subscriber additions in the first half of 2016,” said CEO Mike Fries. “We substantially outperformed our prior-year Q2 and our sequential Q1 results with the addition of 277,000 RGUs in Q2 this year.”

In the UK, Virgin Media demonstrated healthy growth through the period, bringing in 66,000 net new customers, the best Q2 for the brand in eight years, while in Germany, UnityMedia performed strongly also. UnityMedia added 109,000 new customers, representing the strongest period for the brand in 18 months.

The wireless business throughout Europe also posted some healthy numbers, adding 105,000 net new customers taking the total number of subscribers now up to 6.7 million. The majority of this growth came through the company’s established markets in Western Europe.

Although generally positive news the video business is still operating on the wrong side of growth. Virgin Media now has 3 million customers on TiVo, representing 82% of its total user base, however news was not as positive elsewhere. Across the group, video subscribers were down 72,000, though this was a better performance than Q2 2015.