XM won’t ‘chase a weak retail market with excessive discounting,’...
XM won’t “chase a weak retail market with excessive discounting,” Chmn. Gary Parsons told a Wed. UBS conference in N.Y. That would raise subscriber acquisition costs (SACs) unnecessarily, he said: “We think we can keep control on that model…
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while still growing at a positive, reasonable pace.” XM will rely more on automotive OEM for new subscribers, he said, calling OEM a far more efficient enrollment mechanism and far stronger in terms of customer satisfaction. “That does not mean by any means that we're going to abandon the retail marketplace,” he said. In Q&A, CFO Joe Eutenauer said XM has “plenty of flexibility” to raise rates, but has kept them intact to drive subscription growth. Responding to a questioner, Frear said he couldn’t think of reason that a Sirius merger with XM “wouldn’t be a good thing to do” from an investor outlook For listeners, a merger could bring “significant benefits in having a single brand and coordinated offering out to the marketplace, as opposed to overlapping product” and service offerings, he said: “There’s a far more diverse product offering you could put up there for consumers to serve them perhaps even better than they're served today.”