Sirius Loss-Gain Gap Narrowing

Sirius expects to break-even by the end of this year, something rival XM also intends to do. In releasing its fourth quarter 2005 and year-end financials, Sirius President/CEO Mel Karmazin said the signing of Howard Stern helped boost the company bottom line.
“Howard is going to add subscribers every single day.”
The company will eventually stream Stern but only when it can accomplish that securely, said Karmazin.
Sirius reported a net loss of $311.4 million, for the fourth quarter of 2005, and a net loss of $863 million, for the full year. By contrast, XM’s net loss for the fourth quarter of 2005 was $268.3 million and $666.7 million for the year.
Full-year 2005 Sirius revenue grew to $242.2 million, up 262% from $66.9 million in 2004.
XM reported total revenue of $177 million for Q4 and $558.3 million for the year.
Average monthly churn for the fourth quarter and full-year 2005 was 1.5%. Subscriber acquisition costs are dropping, the company says – to $113 for the fourth quarter and $139 for full-year 2005, a 21% improvement over the full-year 2004 level.
For the fourth quarter, Sirius added 900,645 net subscribers from its retail channel and 241,705 net subscribers from its automotive OEM channel to end the year with a total of 3.3 million subscribers.