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BT attracts more users than Sky and other broadband providers
Friday 4th November 2011, by Harry Wallis
BT's prominence as one of the UK's top broadband providers has been backed up by statistics, which revealed that the telecoms firm outstripped its performance expectations for the year so far.
The firm has seen a staggering 46 per cent increase in the number of broadband customers opting for its services in the three months to September 30th 2011, compared to the number of consumers selecting its provision for the same period in 2010.
This equated to an extra 166,000 customers in the third quarter of this year. By comparison, Sky attracted a further 150,000 people to its books, while a mere 19,100 subscribed to Virgin.
BT's sector position has been challenged by other broadband providers in recent years and, owing to the company's size and customer base, it is subject to stringent regulatory control.
However, the figures for the last quarter's performance have gone far beyond analysts' predictions for BT.
Morten Singleton, analyst at Investec, commented: "BT is proving to be the resilient port in the storm."
The result of the added business is that BT's pre-tax profit grew by 15 per cent to £570 million year-on-year, with underlying revenues rising by 0.4 per cent to £4.8 billion.
BT's chief executive Ian Livingston praised the firm's progress, adding: "This was a pretty reasonable set of numbers. With a double digit growth in earnings we are pretty happy."
In addition to its outperformance of other broadband providers, BT's premium television service – BT Vision – also grew faster than its main competitors, Virgin Media and Sky.
However, the firm did acknowledge that this was in context of a significantly smaller customer base than the other two firms, who have 3.7 million and ten million subscribers respectively.
Despite the excellent results, the company has chosen not to readjust its annual forecast, with Mr Livingston explaining: "There are some headwinds, particularly in the small and medium-sized enterprises market. They are spending less on IT, and we are seeing some effects there."
Earlier this week, BT announced that it would be strengthening its broadband service offerings by rolling out its super-fast fibre optic network by the end of 2014 – a year earlier than expected.
