Building on Core Pillars; Accelerate Digital
Astro Malaysia Holdings Berhad | Result highlights for the financial year ended 31 January 2017 (FY17)
Achieved revenue and PATAMI growth amidst challenging market, underpinned by e-commerce and Adex.
• Revenue +2% y-o-y to RM5.6bn.
• PATAMI +1% y-o-y to RM624mn.
• EBITDA -6% y-o-y to RM1.8bn due to investment in key sports content and currency depreciation impacting content costs.
• Strong FCF of RM1.3bn enables fourth interim dividend of three sen per share and final dividend of 0.5 sen per share.
Customer base exceeded 5mn, driven by subscription-free TV service, NJOI.
• Total customers +6% y-o-y to 5.1mn with Pay-TV customers holding steady at 3.5mn and NJOI customers +30% y-o-y to 1.7mn.
ARPU continued to grow to RM100.4, driven by higher take-up of value-added products and services; and reprice of sports pack.
Go Shop grew its scale and reach with the launch of its Mandarin-channel in Singapore in partnership with StarHub Cable Vision Ltd.
• Revenue +38% y-o-y to RM261mn.
• Sold 1.5mn products to 912k customers.
Astro’s strong cross platform reach on TV, radio and digital drove Adex growth.
• Total Adex +10% y-o-y to RM705mn, with digital Adex registering a y-o-y growth of 15%.
• Share of TV Adex and Radex rose to 38% and 73% respectively.
Tun Zaki Azmi, Chairman of Astro said:
“Astro continues to be resilient in a challenging market, underpinned by strong execution of its strategic imperatives to deliver long-term shareholder returns. In line with our dividend policy, the Board is pleased to declare a fourth interim dividend of 3 sen per share and to recommend for shareholders’ approval a final dividend of 0.50 sen per share.”
Dato’ Rohana Rozhan, Group Chief Executive Officer of Astro, said:-
“As we venture into the new year, we do so recognising our market strengths that we need to reinforce and build on, as well as the gaps that we need to aggressively address in order to be a deserving customer media brand of choice.
Our Customers and Community
Today our TV service is in 71% of Malaysian households and growing. That equates to 21mn family members across 5.1mn homes. Our combined engagement with households and individuals across TV, radio, digital and ground events is second to none; radio weekly listenership is at 15.6mn, our digital properties register close to 5.8mn visitors every month, and last year alone we attracted approximately 500k people to over 350 ground events. Additionally, our brand continues to uphold a strong position as one of Malaysia’s most loved and trusted consumer brands.
Our Content
Malaysians are now consuming more Astro content than ever before; our TV viewership now stands at 77%, with an average of 13.9mn viewers tuning in 4 hours daily. Our vernacular content is our pride and joy, achieving record viewership with over 70 vernacular programmes surpassing one million viewers. We will build on this strength by creating more original content in the future and target to own and distribute at least 50% of our annual content spend. We will continue to provide our customers the most compelling content in original vernacular content, exclusive best windows for international as well as live sports content.
Our Customer Experience
To complement traditional viewing, we are driving connected boxes, on demand services and Astro GO. Today more than 507k PVRs are connected to broadband and we aim to have at least 1mn connected PVRs by year end. This enables our customers to enjoy our on demand services which include day date releases, binge box sets and the latest movies. We have Oscar nominated titles such as La La Land, Lion, Hell or High Water and box sets like Game of Thrones, Big Little Lies, The Young Pope and The Walking Dead - all exclusive on Astro within the next 3 months. To drive personalised individual and mobile viewing, we are amplifying our ‘GO’ proposition for both Astro and NJOI. Astro GO is now available to all customers as an extension of their subscriptions, providing an interactive multi-screen experience over iOS and Android mobile devices. Today, 1.1mn registered Astro GO users are watching an average of 3 hours of content per week on their mobile devices.
Accelerating a Digital Lifestyle
Our predominantly vernacular digital properties including apps and web portals are resonating among the millennials and digital natives. We are the fifth largest online and digital platform in Malaysia, earning a digital Adex of RM30mn in FY17and we have every intention to aggressively grow our presence in this digital space thus our share of digital Adex.
Accelerating on our ambition to serve the increasingly digital lifestyle of today’s consumers is a key pillar for Astro. Our collaboration with Amazon Web Services comes at a critical time, as we prepare ourselves to serve the next generation of consumers through complementary digital platforms that suit their needs. We will accelerate our ability to innovate, speed up time-to-market for new and improved services, and adopt game-changing technologies. Importantly, we will also improve the way we work collaboratively across the organisation and with partners, as well as empower teams to share knowledge and best practice, and experiment and learn. Our commitment to a cloud-first infrastructure has enabled us to deliver scalable customer-centric, innovative and personalised digital-first products at a much faster pace.
Tribe, Go Shop and eGG Network : Regional scale
Tribe, our OTT streaming app, has been launched in Indonesia and the Philippines in 2016 and has achieved its first milestone of 1mn downloads in a year. Go Shop, our e-commerce initiative, is now serving close to 1mn online shoppers in Malaysia and Singapore. eGG Network, our eSports platform, is already available in five countries within its first year.
In summary, we are committed to building our reach and relevance in Malaysian households as well as to serve the increasingly digital lifestyle of individuals, locally and regionally, on linear, OTT, digital, communal and social platforms. This in turn, will enable us to drive greater monetisation across our media assets, optimising share of wallets, Adex and commerce. In doing so, we will continue to make disciplined investments and be active managers of our cost to serve while pursuing sustainable long term growth.”
