BENGALURU: India DTH major Dish TV India Ltd (Dish TV) reported 42,000 net subscriber additions for the quarter ended 30 September 2019 (Q2 2020, quarter or period under review), During the six-month period ended 30 September 2020 (H1 2020), the company says that it added 251,000 net subscribers. The company reported subscription revenue of Rs 79.2 crore for the quarter under review.
With programming cost becoming a pass-through item in the New Tariff Regime, subscription and operating revenues for the quarter are not comparable with the corresponding period last year.
Dish TV’s operating revenue in Q2 2020 declined 44 percent to Rs 893.18 crore from Rs 1,594.29 crore. The company reported a net loss of Rs 96.37 crore for Q2 2020 as compared to a profit of Rs 19.73 crore in the corresponding year ago quarter. EBITDA for Q2 2020 was Rs 540.46 crore, which was 3.7 percent lower than the Rs 540.62 crore in Q2 2019.
Company Speak
The company claims in a media release, that the seasonally weak second quarter came bundled with other external challenges this time. Slowing subscriber additions due to a not so robust macro-economic environment, price undercutting by peers, along with heavy rains and flooding in many parts of the country made subscriber acquisitions and retention a challenging task. Dish TV India however chose to be resilient making the best
of every opportunity coming its way.
“Setting aside the price undercutting resorted to by some peers in parts of the country, Dish TV India maintained a fine balance between subscriber acquisition and the cost of such acquisition. The company intentionally avoided adding extremely value conscious subscribers,” said Dish TV group CEO Anil Dua.
Dish TV CMD Jawahar Goel said, “It is evident that even in the New Regime, there has been a propensity to push low rated channels into bouquets with the objective of increasing the viewership of high rated channels. If the Regulation gets implemented in entirety, there would be better pricing that would ensure wider consumption of channels. Content would be subject to subscriber’s filtration and as a distributor we would only be procuring popular content that sells.”
Let us look at the other numbers reported by Dish TV
Total Income for Q2 2020 declined 44.3 percent y-o-y to Rs 896.77 crore from Rs 1,609.96 crore. Total Expenditure for the period under review declined 44.3 percent y-o-y to Rs 879.67 crore from Rs 1,580.35 crore.
Operating expenses in Q2 2020 declined 77.6 percent y-o-y to Rs 193.48 crore from Rs 864.77 crore. Employee benefits expenses in Q2 2020 declined 29.7 percent y-o-y to Rs 44.03 crore from Rs 62.62 crore. Other expenses in Q2 2020 increased 8.7 percent y-o-y to Rs 134.65 crore from Rs 123.83 crore.
