Talk of a Special Dividend22 Nov 2013 19:44
TalkTalk Telecom will look to pay a special dividend as a drop-off in the level of investment needed for its television service coincides with a period of rapid customer growth, its chief executive said on Friday.
Dido Harding told a Morgan Stanley investor conference in Barcelona she hoped to pay out excess cash to show her confidence in a group that is growing strongly and enjoying a slowdown in the rate of customers leaving the service.
"This is a highly cash generative business," she said. "It's one of the reasons why we have grown our dividend in the first half by 15.9 percent, even though we've been investing all this money in our TV business.
"As we come off the peak of subscriber acquisition costs investment it won't be long before the balance sheet gets to that one times debt-to-EBITDA whereupon I think we will look forward to having a really good conversation with our shareholders on how best to return some of that excess cash."
TalkTalk, which targets the budget market with packages of fixed-line broadband and telephony, a basic pay-TV service and mobile, reported results earlier this month showing the group snapping up new customers.
First-half earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation nearly halved to 76 million pounds due to the exceptional costs of its investing in its TV products, on revenue up 1.8 percent at 843 million pounds, but the company has already committed to increasing the full-year dividend by at least 15 percent.
Net debt was up 20 percent on a year ago at 473 million pounds.
Analysts expect annual EBITDA to fall an underlying 31 percent this year to around 244 million euros followed by a rise to 334 million next year and 387 milion in the year ending March 2016, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Harding said at the time of results that the fight between bigger rivals BT and BSkyB to win sports fans had not really hurt demand for its lower-priced 'value' packages of broadband and TV as there was a clear market for people who don't want to pay a premium for sportsidn.
Broadband churn had spiked when rival BT started offering live English Premier League soccer for free to its broadband customers, but the churn, or rate that customers dropped the service, had since come down.
"We did see a tick-up in churn in the first few weeks of the football season, where to be honest for a few weeks our customers and our own sales agents began to believe the PR that BT Sport was really for free and that they'd save money," Harding said on Friday.
"The truth of the matter is that our customers don't save money by switching to BT for BT Sport. As we've got that message more clearly out ... we've seen that churn start to come back down off that peak."
By Kate Holton / BARCELONA, Nov 22 (Reuters)
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