Overall customer relationships increased 281K, up 58% Y/Y to 27.7M, with high-speed Internet adds of 460K the best mark for the quarter in nine years. Comcast reported 688,000 net subscriber adds across its platforms, and Merrill Lynch pointed out that this was 40,000 boxes per day under the X1 roll-out. Excluding items such as gains on sales and acquisition-related items, profit rose 5.2 percent to 81 cents per share, a penny below estimates. It added 1.4 million Internet customers in 2015, including 460,000 in the October-December quarter.
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The company pulled in $19.2 billion in the fourth quarter (for a total-year haul of $74.5 billion), an 8.5 percent increase from Q4 2014. Earlier this week, Time Warner Cable said that it was gaining new TV subscribers for the first time in nearly a decade, and this morning, Comcast is announcing some relatively bright video results of its own. The company a year ago budgeted $300 million to turning around its customer operations, including building an Uber-like app to allow customers to track and rate their technicians, after some embarrassing episodes of poor customer interactions went viral. Cable capital expenditures represented 17.2% of Cable revenue in the fourth quarter of 2015 compared to 16.5% in last year’s fourth quarter. The Company’s business line comprises five divisions: Cable Communications; Cable Networks; Broadcast Television; Filmed Entertainment, and Theme Parks.
Comcast noted that its Cable Communications revenue rose 5.9 percent and operating cash flow rose 4.6 percent.
Comcast would participate in the auction, starting in late March, and buy airwaves “if the price is right”, executives said on an earnings conference call. Despite a quiet movie lineup in the quarter, revenue at the film studio climbed 26 percent to $1.63 billion, helped by DVD releases of blockbuster hits such as “Minions” and “Jurassic World“.
The company is expected to report strong video and broadband subscriber trends, Pacific Crest said in a note. Voice customer additions grew to 139,000, compared with 123,000.
The cable provider posted revenue of $19.25 billion in the period, topping Street forecasts.
Advertising revenue at the cable networks was little changed at $854 million, while total cable network revenue gained 3.4 percent. Operating cash flow at NBCU increased 8.7% to $1.6 billion. Revenue at the broadcast-TV segment, which includes the flagship NBC network, grew 7%, while operating cash flow declined 5.6% to $217 million because of higher expenses.
Also on Wednesday, the company said it was boosting its annual dividend 10% to $1.10 per share.
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Investors asked Comcast execs whether more “transformative M&A” would follow such deals as NBCUniversal’s investment in Vox and BuzzFeed or Comcast’s controlling stake in Universal Studios Japan. Add in the continued rise of programming costs – the company expects an increase of 10 percent in 2016 – and you’re looking at some significant numbers.
