Mumbai : Dish TV has added 0.51 million new subscribers in the fourth quarter of FY2015-16, taking its overall net subscriber base to 14.5 million. The company claims that it has achieved its fiscal target of 1.5 million new additions.
For the quarter ended 31st March 2015, the company has posted a consolidated net profit of Rs 482.8 crore due to a tax reversal of Rs 436 crore in the quarter.
Dish TV’s operating profit ( EBITDA ) during the quarter was at Rs 260.8 crore, while subscription revenue stood at Rs 741 crore, up 12.6 per cent compared to corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal.
The DTH operator also saw its average revenue per user (ARPU) increase by Rs 2 to Rs 174 in Q4 FY16, mainly on the back of a price hike across most of its packs in North and South India by around 4-8% effective 22nd March 2016.
However, the company said that both Dish TV and the DTH sector in total have been reeling under the pressure of an ever increasing service tax that they are still not able to pass on to the subscriber. “As enforcement of Goods and Services Tax ( GST ) regime gets delayed, multiple taxes like Service Tax and Entertainment Tax will continue to be levied on the DTH sector. Multiplicity of taxes makes it almost impossible to charge them to the subscribers.
As a result, price hikes that should have otherwise gone towards increasing the abysmally low ARPUs in the industry are now needed to maintain status quo in an adverse tax environment,” said Jawahar Goel, CMD of Dish TV.
Dish TV has also remained the only company in the Indian DTH sector to have achieved net profitability for second consecutive year.
