KUALA LUMPUR: Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd (Astro) aims to increase its TV services household penetration in the country to 75% by end of next year from 71% or five million households at present. 

Group chief executive officer Datuk Rohana Rozhan (pic) said the growth would be driven by the increasing demand for NJOI, the subscription-free satellite TV. 

She said Astro was seeing growth in its reach and engagement across all platforms, its TV services reaching five million households, which included pay TV (3.4 million) and NJOI (1.6 million), with average viewing of four hours. 

“We will continue growing NJOI while retaining our subscription-based customers. 

“We feel that there is no reason for customers not to subscribe to NJOI as we had every intention to make its proposition more attractive in the coming years,” she told reporters when announcing Astro’s nine months results for financial year ending Jan 31, 2017. 

More Astro customers are also watching Astro contents on mobile devices and on demand, she said, adding that Astro on the go (AOTG) saw its registered users increased 31% year-on year to 1.1 million with an average viewing time of 130 minutes per week. 

“To date there had been about 2.7 million downloads on AOTG and we are eyeing to grow to five million downloads by end of next year,” she said. 

Rohana said Astro’s share of the TV viewership also increased by 1% to 77% as it continued to offer comprehensive and compelling content proposition to viewers with focus on original signature intellectual property, local and Asean movies, sports, and Korean entertainment. 

She said this spurred the groups relevance among advertisers with an advertising expenditure (Adex) grew by 13% year-on-year to RM524mil with its share of TV advertising and radio advertising increased to 37% and 73%, respectively. 

Astro’s average revenue per user for the nine months period had also increased to RM99.9 from RM99.3 underpinned by higher take-up of value added products and services. 

On its content cost this year, Rohana said it was expected to be about 36% of Astro’s TV revenue following a heavy sports year, while next year, the cost was expected to be maintained at the same level or slightly reduced. 

Moving forward, for the full financial year 2017, the company is expected to continue growing its revenue by 3% with Adex revenue contribution trajectory around 13%. - Bernama