Sky Perfect Communications Inc. said Tuesday its group net loss in the first quarter of fiscal 2002 grew more than sixfold from the year before to 19.36 billion yen due to huge costs related to its broadcasting of the World Cup soccer finals.

The operator of the Sky PerfecTV satellite digital broadcasting service said it wrote off most of the 17 billion yen in costs related to the May 31-June 30 event in the April-June quarter.

The 17 billion yen includes fees to purchase rights to broadcast all 64 World Cup games, the cost of producing programs to cover the games, advertising costs and sales promotion expenses, the company said. The Tokyo-based company did not release the cost of the broadcasting rights, due to confidentiality reasons.

The company's decision to air all of the games led to a net increase of 189,000 subscribers in the April-June quarter, a jump of 75 percent from a year ago, it said.

Demand was especially strong in May, when 118,000 new subscribers joined. The surge represented a jump of 257 percent compared with the previous year.

Sky Perfect Communications had 3,231,000 subscribers as of the end of June, the company said.

Sky Perfect's operating loss for the quarter swelled to 18.49 billion yen from 2.87 billion yen.

On a pretax basis, the company incurred a group loss of 19.08 billion yen, compared with a loss of 3.23 billion yen for the same period the year before.

Group revenues jumped 22.6 percent to 17.48 billion yen thanks to the surge in subscribers, but the company said it will keep its earnings projections for the full year unchanged. On May 23, the company projected a group net loss of 24 billion yen and a pretax loss of 25 billion yen on consolidated revenues of 72 billion yen.

The estimated net and pretax losses would jump 95.9 percent and 110.1 percent, respectively, compared with fiscal 2001. Revenues would be up 21.1 percent.