COMPANY NEWS IN BRIEF

Universal Music Group shares drop 30% as streaming growth disappoints

Universal Music Group shed around $15 billion off its value on Thursday after the world's biggest music label reported lower-than-expected streaming and subscription revenue for the second quarter.

The move has wiped off some 13.6 billion euros ($14.75 billion) from their value so far.

UMG's second-quarter subscription revenue growth slowed to 6.9% from 12.5% in the first quarter, missing the 11.1% estimate in company-compiled consensus cited by Barclays.

"The speed and quantum of the slowdown in subscription revenues caught the company and analysts by surprise," JPMorgan analysts said in a note.

The slowdown was largely due to the timing of price increases, Chief Digital Officer Michael Nash said during a call with analysts, referring to hikes by Apple and Amazon that were fully annualised in the second quarter.

"Investors bought UMG mostly for low-double-digit growth in paid streaming, in our view, the main basis for the rich valuation UMG trades at. If paid streaming growth stays lower, we see UMG multiples falling," Barclays analysts said in a research note.

They cut their rating on the stock to "equal weight" from "overweight", also flagging that streaming growth in the third quarter could be similar at about 7%.

-REUTERS-

Strong Africa performance saves Vodafone’s bacon

Vodafone Group beat analyst revenue predictions with strong growth in Africa, offsetting a decline in Germany, the telecommunications firm’s biggest market, where a recent law change is starting to bite. Service revenue grew 5.4% to €7.5-billion (R150-billion) in the first fiscal quarter, the company said on Thursday. That beat the €7.36-billion average estimate of four analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Service revenue in Africa grew 10% to €1.4-billion, supported by price increases in South Africa and strong momentum in Egypt, the company said.

-BLOOMBERG-

Showmax partners with QVWi on SA-made set-top box

Showmax has partnered with South African consumer electronics manufacturer QVWi to launch new streaming hardware, including a set-top box, aimed as “transforming TVs into smart TVs”. The MultiChoice Group-owned streamer said on Thursday that it had partnered with the Durban-based company, which is owned by television manufacturer Skyworth Digital. “From 1 August 2024, select devices will come preloaded with Showmax as a pre-installed app and a complimentary two-month subscription to Showmax Entertainment,” Showmax said in a statement.

Showmax Entertainment Mobile and Showmax Premier League Mobile subscribers will not be able to cast onto a TV using these devices. The QVWi devices are only compatible with the Showmax Entertainment plan. The new devices support dual-band Wi-Fi and 100Mbit/s Ethernet, according to Showmax. They can be used with any streaming service, not only Showmax. The agreement with QVWi follows Showmax’s relaunch earlier this year in partnership with NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of US media conglomerate Comcast.

-TECHCENTRAL-

DStv Premium smashes global sports streaming rivals

Subscribing to a combination of legal international sports streaming services that could provide a similar selection of sports as DStv Premium will cost over double the South African service’s price. In addition, some of these international services will require complex workarounds that might carry additional costs. These include signing up for foreign-based payment methods and a virtual private network (VPN) service, and in some cases, having a cellphone number in a foreign country where the service officially operates.

South Africans have complained about the price of MultiChoice’s top-end DStv Premium product for many years. At R799 for the most affordable streaming-only package, DStv Premium is substantially more expensive than services like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV+. In fact, the monthly subscriptions for all those streaming services work out to around R500. In addition, users could add MultiChoice’s Showmax streaming service for another R99, which provides access to many of the movies and TV shows available on Premium’s entertainment channels.

However, although DStv Premium boasts over 135 channels with a wide range of content, many customers find its real value lies in just a handful of live sports channels that are not available on any other DStv packages. MultiChoice invests significant money in acquiring the broadcasting rights to the most popular sports and their most keenly -followed matches and tournaments. As a result, it can offer 20 SuperSport channels as well as two ESPN channels that offer most if not all the content that a typical South African sports fan wants to watch. There are seven Premium-exclusive channels offering coverage of high-profile events in sports other than football. These include SuperSport’s Grandstand, Rugby, Cricket, Motorsport, Golf, and Tennis channels.

MyBroadband calculated the cost of subscribing to eight international streaming services that could provide similar sports coverage to DStv Premium. We found that no international streaming service offers the range of South African-relevant sports available on DStv Premium. The service that comes closest to DStv Premium in terms of sports variety and relevance to South African audiences is Sky Sport’s Now TV, based in the UK. It boasts 12 live sports channels, which include coverage of many of the best cricket, football, Formula 1, golf, rugby, and tennis events. This subscription costs £26 (R617) for the first six months and then increases to £34.99 (R830) — already more than the price of DStv Premium. The best value-for-money international services are Disney+ Hotstar Super and SonyLIV Premium, both of which operate in India.

-MYBROADBAND-

CrowdStrike says bug in quality control process led to 'Blue Screen of Death'

A CrowdStrike software update that crashed computers globally last week hitting services from aviation to banking and healthcare was caused by a bug in the US cybersecurity firm's quality control mechanism, the company said on Wednesday.

Friday's outage happened because CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor, an advanced platform that protects systems from malicious software and hackers, contained a fault that forced computers running Microsoft's Windows operating system to crash and show the "Blue Screen of Death".

"Due to a bug in the Content Validator, one of the two Template Instances passed validation despite containing problematic content data," CrowdStrike said in a statement, referring to the failure of an internal quality control mechanism that allowed the problematic data to slip through the company's own safety checks.

CrowdStrike did not say what that content data was, nor why it was problematic. A "Template Instance" is a set of instructions that guides the software on what threats to look for and how to respond. CrowdStrike said it had added a "new check" to its quality control process in a bid to prevent the issue from occurring again.

The extent of the damage from the botched update is still being assessed. On Saturday, Microsoft said about 8.5 million Windows devices had been affected, and the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee has sent a letter to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz asking him to testify.

CrowdStrike released information to fix affected systems last week, but experts said getting them back online would take time as it required manually weeding out the flawed code.

Wednesday's statement was in line with a widely held assessment from cybersecurity experts that something in CrowdStrike's quality control process had gone badly wrong.

-REUTERS-