Residential mobile sees 50% YoY growth, Altice anticipates more activity in the second half of 2024
Altice USA made progress across a number of its metrics during the second quarter of 2024, although it still reported decreased revenues compared to the same time last year.
“In the second quarter our company achieved significant improvements in operational metrics and customer satisfaction, growth in our fiber, mobile, and B2B businesses, and continued stabilization of ARPU across our base,” said Dennis Mathew, Altice USA’s chairman and CEO. “We elevated product and network quality, introduced refreshed go-to-market strategies, which are starting to gain traction, and launched Entertainment TV, Optimum’s new low-cost internet TV package available exclusively on Optimum Stream, providing more choice and flexibility for customers. Looking ahead, we have an innovative roadmap of future product and experience enhancements that we are eager to bring to current and prospective customers this year and beyond, and we remain focused on advancing network and service quality, driving profitable customer relationships, and maintaining financial discipline.”
On the company’s quarterly call, Mathew summed it up by saying, “Q2 was another quarter of progress in our transformation journey.”
Altice saw its revenues slide 3.6% year-on-year to $2.2 billion, but CFO Marc Sirota pointed out that this was a “notable improvement” from its trend in recent quarters; the company’s residential revenues were down 4.4% from the second quarter of 2023, but Sirota said that was better than the 5.7% year-over-year decrease that the company had reported between Q2 2022 and Q2 2023.
Bucking that trend was residential mobile service revenue, where Altice USA saw its third consecutive quarter of more than 50% year-over-year growth. The company’s mobile base is small but growing, reaching 385,000 lines during the second quarter.
Mobile net additions for the telco were 33,000, up from 16,000 during the same time last year; Altice USA’s mobile penetration within its customer base is at 5.8%.
“We have a lot of runway to continue to grow the mobile attachment rate and penetration to create stickier customers,” said Sirota. “We anticipate accelerating mobile growth in the second half of the year through sales productivity and exciting new offerings.”
Altice USA plans to extend its mobile sales to more channels and expands its device selection; it added tablets during the second quarter of 2024 and plans in introduce wearables in 2025. Altice also recently started selling mobile in its business-to-business segment, Sirota noted, and plans to also add more managed services in the B2B segment including network-as-a-service and LTE backup.
“As we continue to ramp up on mobile, this should contribute to more of our residential revenue trends over time,” Sirota added.
Altice USA added 40,000 fiber customers during the second quarter to bring its fiber customer base to 434,000, and increased its fiber customer penetration to more than 15%. About 60% of those net additions were from existing customers migrating to fiber, according to Sirota, who said that the company expected such migrations to accelerate in the second half of 2024.
Total broadband subscriber net losses were 51,000 in the quarter, in part due to the loss of the Affordable Connectivity Program, company executives said.
Altice said that it added about 62,000 fiber passings during the quarter to reach 2.8 million and expects to hit the 3 million mark by the end of this year.
