This week the Kudelski Group, perhaps best known to us for its Nagravision conditional access company and for buying control of OpenTV, released a half year set of figures that shows it has turned around considerably from this time last year.
It puts the changes down to a shift to a usage model of TV conditional access, which it began operating in 2008. It said it delivered over 25 million new generation upgrade smartcards to key operators including Dish, Bell and Sogecable and now they are all yielding a monthly service fee.
Nagavision said it would continue to improve in the second half of the year as the process works through its customer base further. This combined with the company’s security division and with its efforts at Middleware and Advertising essentially flat, led to a small group operating for the half, instead of a whacking great loss like last time.
Revenues were up 7% to CHF (Swiss Francs) 454 million ($426 million). And the group turned around a loss last time of CHF 39.8 ($37 million) into net income of CHF 0.5 million ($469,000)
The Digital TV segment generated most of the sales up 12.2% with Italy doing best, due to growth of Mediaset Premium cards and sales of SmarDTV Common Interface modules. Canal+ and TVCabo experienced high double digit growth rates compared to the same period of last year.
American net sales soared 42.7% due to the delivery of those upgraded smart cards at Echostar. South American and Asian sales declined.
During the first half of 2009, the Digital TV division won business at HD+, a subsidiary of the satellite operator SES ASTRA, offering an HD service in Germany. It also won a deal at Abertis Telecom in Spain and at the Vietnam Satellite Digital Television’s (VSTV), a joint venture between the Canal+ Group and Vietnam Cable Television.
DISH Mexico, a partnership between Telmex, MVS and Echostar also launched at the end of 2008 with a satellite offering in 15 cities of Mexico using and by July this year it reached 530.000 subscribers.
Separately Nagravision said it would launched its new Nagra Media widget publishing platform at IBC in a few weeks. IBC is Europe’s equivalent of NAB, the biggest broadcasting show, held in Amsterdam. The widgets will create targeted and familiar recommendations of relevant internet data on TVs, the company said.