Altice USA has revealed operational highlights including revenue, Opex, EBITDA, ARPU, and Capex during Q3 2018.
Altice posted revenue of $2.42 billion (+4.1 percent), Adjusted EBITDA of $1.07 billion (+5.8 percent) with Adjusted EBITDA margin of 44.3 percent (+6.8 percent) in Q3 2018.
Altice said it achieved growth of 2.4 percent in residential business, 6 percent in business services and 37.8 percent in advertising revenue.
Altice said it increased investment for the rollout of Altice One, fiber (FTTH) deployment, and new mobile network.
Altice said annual Capex will be less than $1.3 billion in 2018.
Customer focus
Altice lost 5,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2018 as compared with loss of 8,000 in Q3 2017. Suddenlink drove improvement in customer trends again with Optimum trends reflecting normal seasonality and timing of recent rate event.
Altice has also lost 28,000 Pay TV customers in Q3 2018 as compared with loss of 33,000 in Q3 2017. Suddenlink’s Pay TV customer base fell by 7,000 in Q3 2018 vs 14000 in Q3 2017.
Residential ARPU per customer increased 2.3 percent to $143.0 in Q3 2018 following recent rate event.
Business services revenue rose 6 percent in Q3 2018 boosted by strength in Enterprise & Carrier segment growing 7.4 percent and SMB growth of 5.3 percent.
Altice said approximately 80 percent of Residential broadband gross additions are now taking download speeds of 200Mbps or higher at the end of Q3 with an average data usage of over 240GB per month.
Altice One is available to more than 80 percent of the Altice footprint with the recent expansion across Suddenlink footprint.
Altice USA has reached over 200000 unique Altice One customers (>4 percent of total customers), adding approximately 100000 Altice One customers per quarter.
Altice launched up to 1Gbps 1P fiber (FTTH) broadband service with advanced wireless gateway and Smart WiFi with meshing capabilities.
Altice USA strengthened focus on fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment by launching up to 1Gbps symmetrical 1P fiber broadband services with an advanced wireless gateway for Optimum customers in select areas of Long Island.
Altice USA also rolled out broadband services to its customers on its existing hybrid fiber coax (DOCSIS) cable network. 1Gbps broadband services are expected to be available across the whole Optimum footprint in 2019 through Digital Switched Video upgrades.
Altice will be adding 1Gbps capacity in certain areas in the Suddenlink footprint.
80 percent of Altice USA’s Residential broadband gross additions are taking download speed tiers of 200Mbps or higher as of the end of Q3 2018.
47 percent of the Residential customer base now take speeds of 200Mbps or higher, more than doubling from 23 percent at the end of Q3 2017, and 79 percent of the customer base take speeds of 100Mbps or higher.
The average broadband speed taken by Altice USA’s customer base increased 63 percent to 172Mbps in Q3 2018 from 106Mbps in Q3 2017 and 56Mbps in Q3 2016.
Average data usage per customer reached over 240GB in Q3 2018, growing over 20 percent. Optimum customers are connecting 11 devices in the home on average.
Altice One is improving customers’ broadband experience with an advanced WiFi router and WiFi mini repeaters.
Altice developed the core network to support its MVNO including upgrading and expanding its WiFi network. The commercial launch of a mobile service for Altice USA customers is still on track for 2019.
