Rostelecom TV base grows 13%

Russian telco Rostelecom’s pay TV subscriber base increased by 13% year-on-year to 6.8 million in Q1, the firm announced. 

Of this, Rostelecom counted 1.6 million IPTV customers, up from 0.8 million in the same quarter last year.

Pay TV contributed RUB2.77 billion (€68.9 million) of revenues in the quarter, up 35% year-on-year from RUB2.055 billion.

“Rostelecom leads the market when it comes to performance indicators such as the rate at which customers are subscribing to optic broadband networks and interactive TV services, which are the industry’s key areas of growth,” said Rostelecom Sergey Kalugin.

However he admitted that investments mobile data network rollouts and network upgrades “will impact profitability in the medium term, and this is already noticeable.”

Overall, for the three months ended March 31, Rostelecom said consolidated revenues grew 3% year-on-year to RUB77.1 billion across all its business areas – including telephony services,  broadband, mobile and pay TV.

However, net profits were down 49% year-on-year to RUB6.4 billion, which Rostelecom attributed to a change in the way that its investment in telecoms holding firm Svyazinvest is presented in financial statements. Svyazinvest agreed to merge with its subsidiary Rostelecom back in 2012.