For its quarter that ended on September 30, the cable giant based in Philadelphia exceeded the expectations of Wall Street for both revenue and profit. In the reported quarter, Comcast gained 1,000 triple-play subscribers, 130,000 double-play customers and 24,000 single-play subscribers. In April, the feds quashed Comcast’s $45 billion bid for Time Warner Cable, partly out of concern that the merged company might undermine online video rivals like Netflix.
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NBCUniversal’s revenue surged 20 percent on the box-office take of billion-dollar blockbusters Minions and Jurassic World, boosting third-quarter earnings for its parent company, Comcast Corp. Sales in the business service division, which sells phone, Web and video services to companies, rose more than 19 percent to $1.21 billion, and has become one of the company’s fastest-growing sources of revenue. Unfortunately, net income did not follow suit, though the earnings per share (EPS) result was exactly where analysts predicted it would be. On the broadcast side, things were slightly better, with domestic national advertising up 2 percent.
Aside from mobility, the other big story coming out of Comcast’s quarterly earnings report was the continued acceleration of the deployment of the company’s X1 video platform, which is now in nearly 25% of video subscriber households.
Revenue grew 7% at the unit that includes the company’s cable TV networks, despite ongoing ratings pressures, but operating cash flow-a measure of profitability-declined 3.9% due to increased programming expenses from the licensing of Nascar rights.
By December 2013, Comcast had rolled out the Nashville system to Atlanta and a handful of smaller markets, many in the South. It also offered a slow Internet plan of 3 megabits per second that gave you a $5 credit if you used 5GB or less each month, and charged you $1 for each gigabyte of data over 5 GB. It lost 48,000 cable TV customers (compared with 81,000 lost in the year-earlier period) but made up for the contraction by increasing the number of high-speed Internet and business services subscribers.
Discussing Comcast’s cable operations, Roberts said the company has deployed 1.5 million voice remote control. Broadcast TV revenues came in at $1,971 million, up 11.3% year over year. Vox Media, Buzzfeed, AwesomenessTV, Refinery29, The Onion, Mic, Vice and its own subsidiary NBC Sports are a few of Comcast’s content partners. Notably, Comcast recently invested around $450 million in Vox Media and Buzzfeed.
A wireless service from Comcast would aim to compete with established carriers by offering lower prices, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Geetha Ranganathan and Paul Sweeney wrote in a research note Thursday. (NYSE: T) and Verizon Communications Inc.
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Comcast now carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
