Vivint gets quarter-million new subscribers in 2015

PROVO, Utah—Vivint Smart Home on March 8 announced its fourth quarter and year-end financial and operational results, showing record increases across the board, including nearly a quarter-million new smart home subscribers.

For the fourth quarter, Vivint's total revenue increased 14.8 percent to $175 million, with record total revenues for the year at $653.7 million, a 16 percent increase over last year.

Vivint added 33,162 new smart home subscribers in Q4, a 53.9 percent increase over the same period in 2014. In 2015, it added a total of 236,562 new smart home subscribers, up 15.7 percent over the prior year. Total RMR for the year was $55.7 million, up from $48.7 million in 2014. In addition, the company is reporting a 78 percent adoption rate of its Advanced Smart Home Services.

“It was a tremendous year for us,” Vivint's chief marketing officer Jeff Lyman told Security Systems News. He noted that although Vivint is “in its purest sense, a security company,” the rise in demand for smart home services is helping to drive the company's success in 2015 and into 2016.

“We have packages that are security only but when you look at our numbers from 2015, eight out of every 10 new consumers that we brought on were coming on with smart home packages,” he explained.

“We qualify a smart home package to be a monitored security option plus a minimum of two smart home devices or services, and that would be inclusive of smart locks, smart thermostats, garage-door controls, doorbell cameras, outdoor/indoor cameras, as well as our cloud-storage service option that we can now provide with our new Space Monkey product.”

One new smart home product that is helping drive Vivint's success is its new doorbell camera. “We created the doorbell camera at the Vivint Innovation Center here, and that became one of our highest attached smart home services in 2015, and both the industry and consumer reaction was great for that product,” Lyman said.

In addition to the nearly quarter-million new smart home subscribers, Vivint surpassed one million customers overall in 2015.