Sky transforms into communications business

It looks like Sky are doing almost embarrassingly well - which does explain NewsCorp's enthusiasm to take control with a nudge and a wink to the political elite.

Revenues at £1.7bn up 9% with operating profit up 16% at £295m with an operating margin of 18%. Key to this is the management of the transformation from pay tv operator to fully fledged communications business. 50-60% of new customers take the pay tv triple play and by the end of this year over 85% of UK homes will fall within the remit of Sky's unbundled exchanges. In the conference call post results it was revealed that about two thirds of arpu growth came from the communications business (fixed line telephony, broadband, mobile) .

SkyGo (delivery of the Sky service to other devices) has gone from nowhere to 1.6 million unique users.

There are bound to be bumps in the road going forward (such as the recent ECJ ruling and activities of the competition commission) but it does look like most of the commercial competitors are very much runners up.