There were no bombshells during this morning's annual shareholder meeting at Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI). That's probably a good thing for a company that's gone from the brink of Chapter 11 bankruptcy to a recent bullish hot streak in just three months. A little stability is refreshingly welcome -- but so were the morsels of information the meeting did reveal.
For starters, the satellite radio giant broke down the metrics behind the new subscriber plans it rolled out late last year. It's stuck with the $12.99 monthly pricing for regular accounts for another two years to appease regulators, so its pricing flexibility here comes in offering different packages at ideally higher price points.
The "Best of" package is a winner. 748,000 Sirius and XM subscribers are paying an extra $4 a month to access choice exclusive content from the rival service. That's a healthy contrast to the 101,000 subscribers who have downgraded to cheaper plans with limited programming.
Sirius XM also plans to use social media sites to drive retention, interaction, and cost-effective subscriber growth -- but then, so does everybody these days. It's great to see individual Sirius XM channels reaching out to fans through Twitter, Facebook, and News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace, but will they truly stand out? I wrote about the company's struggles to make a dent with its official Sirius channel on Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) YouTube last month, and its fortunes haven't improved since. The channel has less than 600 free subscribers, despite regular updates full of compelling content.
CEO Mel Karmazin is now emphasizing Sirius XM as a cash flow growth story -- and rightly so. Subscribers and revenue growth have grown by just 3% and 5% respectively over the past year, while cash operating expenses have been slashed by 23%.
The slowdown in subscriber growth is actually helping the company's cash flows at this point. A slide presented during the meeting showed that it takes the company 12 months to make back its subscriber acquisition costs if 70% of new car buyers with factory-installed satellite receivers become paying subscribers at the end of their trial periods. It takes 29 months of subscriber fees to cover the acquisition costs if only 30% of the car owners convert into paying customers. Since the actual results have historically split the difference, it takes less than two years to cover the initial outlay. That's a fair trade in most subscriber businesses, though it also explains why Sirius XM's cash flows can improve as its subscriber base temporarily contracts.
Can Sirius XM do better? Sure. The company points out how it has a healthier churn rate than Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), but its subscriber turnover is still considerably higher than satellite-based services like DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) and Dish Network (Nasdaq: DISH).
Improving penetration in the automobile market, rolling out an upcoming Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes Music Store app for digital streaming, and launching initiatives to win over subscribers in the used-car market with dormant receivers will also help, though Sirius XM will likely remain a cash flow story -- not a growth tale -- in the near term.
Sirius XM has a few months of synergies to play with. It also achieved debt relief after pushing out most of its near-term maturities. The path to the next annual shareholder meeting won't be as bumpy this time around.
Still, it'd be great to see Sirius XM as both a cash flow and a growth story. That'd be the very best kind of bombshell.
More news than static on Sirius XM:
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