Half Year 2019 Results

LUXEMBOURG, 26 July 2019 -- SES S.A. announced its financial results for the six months ended 30 June 2019 with performance in line with SES’ expectations, continued growth in Networks’ revenue and financial outlook unchanged.

Steve Collar, President and CEO, commented: “We’ve had a solid first six months with financial results in line with our expectations, with continued revenue growth in Networks, strong control over cost and discretionary spending and important progress towards reshaping SES with the objective of delivering exceptional services and driving customer success.

Our Networks business continued to expand on the back of another strong performance in Mobility and Government while we’ve built further commercial traction that can support our Fixed Data business. Of note in H1, we’ve added again to our market-leading position in cruise – with more ships for Genting and the announcement of premium brand Ritz-Carlton; we’ve secured Teleglobal as an anchor customer for SES-12 in Indonesia; expanded connectivity services in Colombia and Brazil; while also restoring connectivity to citizens in Papua New Guinea following a major earthquake. With encouraging levels of demand across our Networks segments, I’m looking forward to the contribution from the additional O3b satellites, which very recently came into operation, as well as being that much closer to the launch of O3b mPOWER in 2021.  

While the market environment in Video remains challenging, we’ve delivered value to customers across our core neighbourhoods and are starting to see benefits of bringing together our infrastructure and MX1 businesses into a single operational unit. In the period, we signed further renewals in our core neighbourhoods; grew our video platforms with new customers in Ethiopia, Brazil and Ivory Coast; expanded our managed services relationship with Discovery in Germany; and MX1’s Sports & Events team were instrumental in bringing the Women’s World Cup and Eurovision Song Contest to viewers across our neighbourhoods.

Looking ahead, our priority for H2 is to deliver on our financial outlook and the revenue expansion implied. We achieved this in H2 2018 and we are on track to do so this year. We’ve now secured 90% of the expected revenue for 2019 and have good visibility of future revenue across Video and Networks.

With respect to C-Band and our ongoing market-based engagement in support of the rapid deployment of 5G services in the U.S., through the C-Band Alliance, we have made further progress this quarter. The CBA has been extremely active with all stakeholders as focus and intensity around the repurposing of spectrum gathers momentum. I believe the record clearly shows that our proposal remains the only one that appropriately balances the support to the 120 million U.S. TV and radio households with the need to quickly, efficiently and safely repurpose mid-band spectrum for 5G. I’m encouraged by the comments of the FCC Chairman who believes that there will be ‘results to show’ in the Fall.”

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