Sirius XM ended 2012 with 23.9 million users and ended the first quarter with 24.4 million users. Today’s projection is to end the year with roughly 25.3 million subscribers.
If you want to know just how much difference the company sees between it and Pandora Media Inc. (NYSE: P) and terrestrial radio, the numbers are rather stark. Sirius XM showed $142.34 in revenue per subscriber in 2012. That compares to only $6.51 per active Pandora user and $12.91 per Clear Channel listener.
A driving force, no pun intended, is new car sales. Sirius XM says that of the 14.5 million new cars sold in 2012 the company had 67% penetration in them. The forecast used to derive the higher subscriber numbers appears to be based on expected car sales growth. The company used projections of 15.3 million new cars sold in 2013 and 15.9 million in 2014. From 2015 to 2017 it used 16.3 million cars on a static basis per year. Sirius even sees more than 100 million Sirius XM-enabled vehicles in operation in 2017 to 2018.