Sirius XM posts strong Q4/FY 2016, still denies Pandora interest

Sirius XM reported its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2016 earnings. The satellite radio company posted net income of $204.57 million, or 4 cents per share, for the quarter on revenue of $1.3 billion. In the full 2016 fiscal year, Sirius XM reported net income of nearly $746.3 million, or 15 cents per share. Revenue for the year totaled nearly $5.02 billion, compared with $4.57 billion in 2015. Sirius SM also posted more than 31 million subscribers, a new record. Looking forward into 2017, the company projected revenue of about $5.3 billion and adjusted EBITDA of about $2.025 billion.

Sirius XM CEO James Meyer deflected questions about the company’s will-they-won’t-they interest in buying Pandora. He said that the comments made by CFO David Frear at a Citibank conference on the subject were “right on point;” Frear had called the chances of an acquisition as “not being likely.”

The other coming area of interest for Sirius XM is mobile listenership. “Our focus on streaming is more about enhancing the overall listening capability of our products, not necessarily saying, well, let’s just go after customers who only want to listen on their mobile phone,” Meyer said. “That said, we offered a mobile-only plan and you’ll see us experimenting with more and more over that over the next months and years to come.”