Sirius XM Radio reported strong subscriber and revenue growth for 2012 on Tuesday and described new features that the company hopes will put competitive pressure on Internet radio services like Pandora and Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio.
Sirius had $3.4 billion in revenue in 2012, up 13 percent from the year before, and it ended 2012 with 23.9 million subscribers, up two million, the company’s biggest annual subscriber gain since 2007.
For the year, it had $3.5 billion in net income, largely because of a $3 billion income tax benefit, and $920 million in adjusted earnings. For the fourth quarter, Sirius had $892 million in revenue, a 14 percent gain from the same period the year before but lower than the $899 million that analysts had expected.
It matched earnings estimates of 2 cents a share for the fourth quarter. In midday trading, Sirius’s stock was down slightly on the news.
Last month, Liberty Media, the company controlled by the billionaire investor John C. Malone, took control of Sirius after nearly a year of buying shares on the open market. The earnings announcement on Tuesday was the first with Sirius’s new interim chief executive, James E. Meyer, who in December succeeded Sirius’s longtime chief, Mel Karmazin.
At the beginning of 2012, Sirius raised its subscriber fees by $1 to $1.50 per month. It was the first time that Sirius has raised prices, and only the second time XM had done so, Mr. Meyer said in a conference call with investors. (The two satellite radio services merged in 2008.)
But that price hike appears to have had little effect on Sirius’s subscriber growth, which has been helped by an improved market for new cars as well as the gradual spread of Sirius’s availability in used cars. The company says that 50 million cars now on the road are able to receive Sirius.
On the call Tuesday, Sirius executives discussed new features like MySXM, which is now in public beta testing. Like Pandora or iHeartRadio, it is a custom radio feature that will let listeners tailor Sirius broadcasts to their tastes, and it will compete against those companies as more services push to introduce advanced listening features in new cars.
“MySXM users will now hear more of the music they love tailored to how they want to hear it,” Mr. Meyer said on the conference call. “If they happen to hear a song they don’t like, MySXM will let them skip it.”
Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/sirius-reports-revenue-and-subscriber-growth-in-2012/?partner=rss&emc=rss