Dish Network Corp. Q1 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

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2008-05-27 00:50:24.0

Tags: EchoStar Communications Corp.

Question-and-Answer Session

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Jeff Wlodarczak.

Jeffrey Wlodarczak - Wachovia

Hi guys. Charlie, could you provide more color on DISH's competitive position. It appeared that the vast majority of your peers had better than expected results in the first quarter? And do you feel that DISH has to turn the corner on the operational issues that emerge in the third quarter? And if I could follow that up by just asking about the plans for 700-megahertz Spectrum you purchased, can you give us some idea of the cost, the timeframe, SATS and other partners are going to sharing the cost? Thanks.

Charles W. Ergen - Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer

I let Karl address that 700-megahertz but in relation to yours, I would say that our competitive position vis-à-vis the industry, probably within? with the cable side probably would maintain about the same but I would say vis-à-vis DirecTV and phone companies have entered the marketplace, they get the lion share of new video ads, phone, obviously because they are new to the marketplace, they? nowhere to go but often don't have a big face to churn and they've got a competitive product. And DirecTV because I think they are performing better than we are both operationally and from a competitive primarily in the HDD space. So we really have three areas that we have to work on as a company and that we're focused on.

First is operations, where we just weren't providing the kind of customer servicing experience that were used to a DISH Network and it’s shown up in some of the surveys where we haven't... where we have slipped year-over-year in terms of our total customer service. I basically got involved in operations as I said I think on February 1, so, I have gone around and seeing most of the operations and I would describe the operations at least on as of February 1 they were... they weren't broken but the wheels are pretty wobbly, so we basically had the lugnut [ph] branch out in time at the lugnuts and we've made good progress in making sure we are answering our phone calls now and got that back on control. We still have a lot of work to do in reducing the reasons for people to call, doing a better job on our installs the first time, making our product a little bit simpler and communicate a little bit easier to how to operate the system. But again it's... it's just hard work and it took us... the product took us three years to get out of the alignment. It can take us little bit of time to get it to back in alignment where we’ve got the right team here to do it.

 

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