Pressure to deliver guidance is suppressing commercial activity which in turn is making guidance more challenging to reach. Although the dividend is well covered for now, the deteriorating cashflow outlook is unhelpful.

The change in strategy to give autonomy to country markets and to be more customer-centric has its merits but is not consistent with many Group initiatives and will take a long time to bear fruit.

Vodafone reiterated its intention to merge with H3G in the UK. Recent setbacks to approval prospects may not be as detrimental as they appear, and there is much to be gained with the potential to increase cashflow four-fold.

Across Europe, markets are becoming more competitive. Incumbent pay-TV paltforms (e.g. Sky or Canal+) face increasing threats from both internet-based services (e.g. Netflix and Amazon), and telecoms operators

Telecoms providers are proving the most potent challengers as they enter the premium football rights market to create attractive triple and quad play bundles – examples include BT, SFR and Telefónica. The latter is now the main pay-TV operator in Spain whereas France’s Canal+ has entered into a strategic alliance with Orange

Across the top five markets (UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy), Sky remains the leading operator with an estimated 21.5m video subscribers, twice as many as Netflix

Sky delivered 5% year-on-year revenue growth over the first nine months at constant exchange rates, although operating profits fell due to several factors, most notably the massive step-up in UK Premier League TV payments under the new contract

On closer inspection, relatively weak UK & Ireland Q3 revenue growth compared with previous quarters largely reflects one-off special factors 

Otherwise, positive quarters for Sky Germany & Austria and Sky Italy and improving cost efficiencies suggest that the Sky Group remains broadly on track to deliver its Investor Day 2016 guidance objectives