*****Sirius conf. call - Q4 earnings, future plans LIVE LISTENING THREAD 2/5 8am**

[Dead Air Dave]

SiriusXM will hold a conference call at 8:00 am ET on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 to discuss these results. Investors and the press can listen to the conference call via the company's website, www.siriusxm.com, and on its satellite radio service by tuning to Sirius channel 123 or XM channel 173. The call will also be available on the Sports Play-by-Play channel 962 on SiriusXM Internet Radio as well as through the SiriusXM Internet Radio App for the Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, and on BlackBerry and Android-powered smartphones.

[Dead Air Dave]

Big meeting the same afternoon! Will something be announced on the call????

[Obi Drunkenobe]

I might have to actually listen tomorrow.

[pheelios]

[Dead Air Dave]

These things are VERY dry, so be prepared. First they go over the numbers, then they talk future plans, then they take questions.

Somone who invests or has a bank connection should sign up to speak and drop a Z3

[Scarfo]

[Dead Air Dave]

Anyone listening?

[Rodney21a]

Hope Howard gets put out of his misery. He knows that has been on the downward spiral from his apex for years now. So.

[Mike]

Yeah did they announce anything?

I'm sure Howard's meeting this afternoon would be based on anything that happened this morning

[RevHortonHeat]

Yeah did they announce anything?

I'm sure Howard's meeting this afternoon would be based on anything that happened this morning

nothing show related. q&a seemed to be focused on stock buyback. they're going to offer something pandora related with "MySXM"?

[Mike]

yeah just found a transcript. no talk about stern and no questions about him. aka no one cares

[Rodney21a]

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1157...ce=google_news

highlights

John Meyer CEO-

In 2012, we added more than 2 million net new subscribers, the largest number of new subscribers in a single year since 2007. At 1.7 million net additions, our 2012 self-pay subscriber growth was up 36% over 2011 and 69% over 2010’s self-pay net additions.

Our overall penetration rate was 68% in the fourth quarter and 67% for the full year 2012. We expect to be in this range over the next few years as OEMs remain very committed to satellite radio, including the deployment of our new 2.0 radios in additional models as well as at additional OEMs.
SIRIUS XM ended 2012 with approximately 50 million satellite-equipped vehicles in operation in the United States, roughly a 20% penetration rate of all registered vehicles on the road and up from about 40 million vehicles at the end of 2011.
This trend just keeps going. Driven by rising auto sales and our strong new car penetration rate, we expect the number of enabled vehicles to approximately double in the next five years.
The rising number of pre-owned vehicles on the road combined with our marketing initiatives are certainly boosting our subscriber additions for previously-owned cars.


At the end of the day, however, it’s our brand name talent, commercial free music and exclusive content that continue to attract and retain listeners. We continue to deliver unique subscriber experiences that make for the best in audio entertainment and we remain aggressive about making sure we provide the best available programming to our listeners.
We’ve expanded our online sports offerings in 2012 to make play by play available from the NFL, major league baseball, NASCAR, the NBA and the NHL and added a number of high profile sports personalities to our rosters of hosts.
Our town hall and artist confidential series are drawing some of the biggest names in pop culture and entertainment to deliver exclusive interviews and performances to our subscribers, including Quentin Tarantino, Jane Fonda, One Direction, KISS, Aerosmith, Taylor Swift, Alicia Keys and Willy Nelson, just to name a few.
We were also adding new programming in the important comedy area, such as Comedy Central Radio, launching this spring with the biggest brand name in comedy, and a new daily talk show with Martha Stewart.
We have the best audio entertainment content in the country and are constantly looking for unique, innovative programming to improve our offering even further.

As you know, we’ve had a lot of change in the last six weeks here at SIRIUS XM. Liberty Media has purchased additional shares in the open market and converted their remaining preferred shares, bringing their ownership of our common stock to more than 50%. And we recently welcomed three new directors to our board.

David Frear - EVP, CFO

Thanks, Jim. The fourth quarter was another extraordinary performance by SIRIUS XM turning in our best quarter for self-pay additions since the merger. We adding 529,000 self-pay subscribers in the quarter driving full-year total subscriber additions to 2,008,000 and bringing total subscribers to 23.9 million.

SIRIUS XM is one of the best growth stories in media. In 2012, we grew revenues by 12.7%, adjusted EBITDA by 25.9% and free cash flow by 71%. Our 2013 guidance issued a few weeks ago continues our record of cost effective growth.
We expect to see another strong year with $1.6 million net self-pay subscriber additions as total subscribers will grow to 25.3 million. Revenue will exceed $3.7 billion, nearly 10% growth over 2012.
Adjusted EBITDA will grow more than 20%, exceeding $1.1 billion, and free cash flow will continue to grow faster than EBITDA as it approaches $900 million.
Free cash flow per share is also growing at a rapid rate and it will grow faster as we begin to buy back stock. Based on our reported fully diluted shares and free cash flow, free cash flow per share grew from roughly 6.4 cents in 2011 to 10.3 cents in 2012.
Now, just for the sake of argument, if you assumed retire about 600 million shares in our $2 billion buyback program and assume our guidance of approaching $900 million in pre-cash flow for 2013, free cash flow per share would trend towards $0.15 or roughly 40% growth over 2012’s level.

Question-and-Answer Session

OperatorAnd our next question is from John Tinker with Maxim.John Tinker - MaximYou haven’t discussed your ratings for a while, in terms of how many people actually listen to your service who take the service versus, say, listening to an iPod or radio. And I wondered if you could give us some idea of how that’s going. Jim MeyerWell, we’ve been competing against iPod and terrestrial radio for 10 years now. I’ve been here for 10 years, I don’t ever remember having talked about ratings between satellite radio, terrestrial radio, internet radio, and iPod listening. But there’s a lot of competition in audio entertainment. There are complementary services. Many of our subscribers are internet radio listeners, and many of them have personal digital music collections, and so that’s just been part of the program for 10 years now. John Tinker - MaximI think actually you published a number about two or three years ago, I think in the K, and you suggested that people that had your service listened - you had said about 70% of the listening, which was obviously pretty high..

Jessica Reif Cohen - Bank of America Merrill LynchRight. And then just switching gears, I have a question for Scott. You said that he’s on the call. You have differentiated content, and I think Jim was the one who kind of laid out a lot of the stuff that you have, the town halls and interviews, etc. As you look out to this kind of content, which is really unique, and exclusive, do you begin to see pressure on costs, or conversely are there ways for you decrease costs in other areas? Scott GreensteinThere’s always going to be pressure on cost, because people that have valuable content and copyrights want to maximize the amount they can get for them. On the other hand, they definitely see the benefits of their content being used and distributed on Sirius XM, whether it’s through awareness or the fact that often our listeners and therefore their content are being heard by credit card-bearing audience, and that provides a valuable filtering tool to get to people that can buy content, which is what their key offering would be, or to buy concert tickets or anything else, sports tickets and all that. So while the pressure is there, we’re trying to make sure that we offer the best we can in a two-way street to those copyright holders to do the best we can. So, so far that’s working and it’s clear our costs are being held under control.

[Rodney21a]

So after reading through the transcript I draw these conclusions.

The Growth of Sirius XM listenership is nonindependent of what Howard is doing for them currently because they are converting from people who try the product from OEM installs on new cars. So if Howard goes, resigns, or gets fired it will have little of no affect on the companies bottom line.

Things aren't looking good for Wiggy.

That is not to say that he was instrumental in keeping XM a vialbe brand in 2005-2006 but he served his purpose.