Liberty Global Reports Third Quarter 2018 Results
Liberty Global plc today announced its three months (“Q3”) and nine months (“YTD”) 2018 financial results. Our operations in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic (collectively, the “Discontinued European Operations”) and the former LiLAC Group have been accounted for as discontinued operations. Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this release relates only to our continuing operations. As used in this release, the term “Full Company” includes our continuing operations and the Discontinued European Operations. For additional information, including the reasons that we present selected information on a Full Company basis, see note 1. In addition, on January 1, 2018, we adopted new revenue recognition rules on a prospective basis and a new presentation of certain components of our pension expense on a retrospective basis. All information in this release is presented on a comparable basis with respect to both of these accounting changes. For additional information concerning our discontinued operations and these accounting changes, see notes 2 and 3.
CEO Mike Fries stated, “The continued operating and financial momentum at Virgin Media helped fuel our Q3 results. With respect to our U.K. subscriber growth, we generated over 100,000 net additions, which represents a record third quarter performance. This achievement was supported by strong volume growth in both our Project Lightning and legacy footprints. From a product perspective, we continue to reap the benefits of our next-generation V6 set-top box and Hub 3 WiFi router deployments, as we saw meaningful year-over-year improvement in churn. We also announced a 4.5% average U.K. customer price rise, which should underpin our results in the coming quarters. In our other markets, we reported mixed results as Telenet delivered 8.4% rebased OCF growth in the quarter, driven by synergy realization, while we posted a 9% rebased OCF contraction in Switzerland.”
