News of its first SDV sale in China was minimal compensation for the sting of lower revenue and a bigger financial loss for BigBand in its fourth quarter.
The company reported that fourth-quarter 2010 revenue was $26.3 million, down from $34.4 million in the corresponding quarter in 2009. BigBand had a loss of $5.9 million, compared with a loss of $1.2 million a year ago.
Looking at the company’s sequential reporting underscores the desultory nature of its financial performance. BigBand had logged increased revenues and a profit in the immediately preceding Q3.
For fiscal 2010, total revenues were $111.7 million, compared with $139.5 million reported in 2009. The net loss was $31.6 million, versus a net loss of $6.7 million in FY ’09.
BigBand said it closed fiscal year 2010 with $143.5 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.
“While our financial performance in fiscal year 2010 and our current outlook are disappointing, our recent progress with our customers and products is promising,” commented Amir Bassan-Eskenazi, president and CEO of BigBand Networks. “We are encouraged by our recent SDV win in Asia, we have received promising feedback on the MSP QAM, and are experiencing growing interest in our vIP Pass and advanced advertising solutions. We are optimistic that the strategy we are pursuing will allow for improved financial results in the second half of 2011.”
The win in Asia Bassan-Eskenazi referred to was with China’s Jiangsu Cable, already a customer of BigBand’s BMR systems. Jiangsu Cable decided to also implement BigBand’s switched digital video (SDV) solution. BigBand said this is its first commercial SDV deployment outside of North America.
Jiangsu Cable claims more than 17 million subscribers. The company selected Zhenjiang as the initial regional deployment of SDV within the province and plans to expand to other cities in coming years to address the bandwidth limitations for multi-services delivery.