Liberty Global LatAm operations post 6.7% revenue growth

Liberty Global's LiLAC Latin American operations unit consisting of Chilean cable operator VTR and Choice Puerto Rico, also a cable operator, saw a 6.7% year-on-year increase in revenue in dollar terms to US$309mn in the third quarter.

Chile's VTR posted revenue growth of 7.0% fueled by subscriber additions, higher Arpu and strong growth in mobile subscriptions for the company's MVNO.

Growth took into account currency depreciation of the Chilean peso against the US dollar of 14% year to date.

Choice Puerto Rico posted 6.3% revenue growth in Q3 thanks to Arpu gains and the success of the company's B2B business, which grew 20% year-on-year.

As of September, the LiLAC group provided a total of 3.5mn subscription services with 4.1mn homes passed in Puerto Rico and Chile.

The services consisted of 1.3mn video, 1.3mn broadband internet, and 0.9mn telephony subscriptions.

During the third quarter the number of revenue generating units increased 24,000, with Chile accounting for the majority.

Total customers increased by 10,000 to 1.7mn.

From a bundling perspective, 66% of customers subscribed to more than one product.

Faced with increasing competition in Chile, with the arrival of WOM and MVNO Simple this year, VTR has ramped up its subscriber acquisition efforts for its mobile service and added 5,000 subscribers in Q3 alone for a total of 134,000.

In July, VTR said it would migrate all of its subscribers to 4G LTE at no additional cost.

WOM has shaken up the market with low cost 4G data offerings.

Worldwide, Liberty Global posted 4% revenue growth in Q3 to US$13.7bn.

In 2014 Liberty Global considered spinning off its units in Latin America and the Caribbean into a separate company as it concentrated on Europe. Instead, it launched a tracking stock for its operations in the region (the LiLAC Group), which started trading in July this year.