Telewest on Set-Top Box Shortage, Affect on Sales: Comment
London, July 21 (Bloomberg) -- The following is a statement issued by Telewest Communications Plc, the U.K.'s No. 2 cable company, about a shortage in set-top boxes needed to offer digital television.
``In common with the rest of the cable industry, Telewest is experiencing short-term problems accessing sufficient set-top boxes to cope with demand from customers for our digital service. There is currently a worldwide shortage of the flash memory chips needed for the boxes, which has slowed down production. We are working with our supplier, Pace Microsystems, to resolve this and they have assured us that normal supply levels will resume as quickly as possible.
``In the meantime, we have stopped actively marketing the service temporarily, but will continue to migrate existing analogue customers with current supplies and as further boxes become available. Moreover, in order to satisfy customer demand, we are continuing to offer our analogue service. Customers will be upgraded to the digital service when the supply bottleneck of boxes is resolved.
``We have forged ahead with preparing the network for digital and 90 percent of our network is now digital-capable. We will resume full-scale marketing of digital as the supply of boxes improves. Demand for our Active Digital service has proved extremely strong and we remain fully committed to rolling it out as quickly as possible to the greatest numbers of subscribers.''
Jul/21/2000 6:47 ET
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