By Noelle McElhatton, Marketing Direct, 30 April 2009, 10:15am

BSkyB customer acquisition grows, but churn up too

LONDON - BSkyB, whose key acquisition channels are direct mail and door-drops, grew profits on the back of new customer sign-ups.

Pretax profits at BSkyB rose 13% to £63m for the three months to 31 March as more customers signed up for its high-definition digital service Sky+HD.

However the broadcaster still faces issues with customer churn.

Although it added 243,000 customers for Sky+HD, many existing customers left, meaning the net gain was 80,000 new customers.

Customer churn was 10.6 percent, compared with a Reuters forecast of 10.8 percent.

A high volume door-drop campaign helped promote Sky+HD, with more than one million subscribers now signed up.

Revenue rose to £1.4bn, from £1.25bn in the same period last year.

Sky has a total of 9.3 million customers, with 5 million of those now subscribing to Sky+, the service that lets viewers record programmes.

"Looking ahead to the rest of 2009, we expect conditions to remain challenging," BSkyB said. "In difficult times, customers are making careful choices."

BSkyB recently won the rights to show more than 80% of live televised Premier League games in the UK from 2010, beating rival Setanta.

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All Comments

Kat Kashefi - 30 April 2009

The churn rate is high for a good Reason, and that's simply because Sky does not look after their Existing customers, why should I or any person pay £99 to get a HD box, when I can cancel my current deal and get the new box for free! perhaps they need to work on a retaining customers scheme!