(Bloomberg) — Comcast Corp.’s latest dip in broadband growth and accelerating TV subscriber losses are fanning investors’ fears that the slowdown in the cable industry isn’t over.
The company added 262,000 internet subscribers in the first quarter, but executives said on an earnings call Thursday that excluding the conversion of customers getting free service during the Covid-19 pandemic, the “normalized” gain was actually about 180,000.
As the first of the cable companies to report, Comcast’s results could point to weakness across the whole sector. While the pandemic was good for cable companies when home-bound customers needed more and faster internet connections, the post-surge hangover is lingering longer than some had hoped.
“Results from Comcast are likely an indication that industry growth has continued to decelerate,” MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a research note.
The shares fell as much as 8.3%, their biggest drop since March 2020. Comcast’s stock had already been trading at a 17-month low. The results also weighed on shares of cable peer Charter Communications Inc., which tumbled more than 6% on Thursday. Charter’s earnings will be released Friday.
Comcast says its churn rate, the percentage of internet customers canceling service each month. is at a record low. But gains among mobile competitors including T-Mobile US Inc. suggest there may be a shift in market share. Phone companies are selling wireless home internet services for as little at $50 a month.
Comcast’s TV performance wasn’t any better. The company shed a record 512,000 cable-TV subscribers as more people choose streaming options. That’s more than the 439,599 TV subscribers that analysts expected to the company to lose.
NBC’s money-losing streaming service, Peacock, saw a more than five-fold increase in revenue due mostly to a surge in subscribers related to the Olympics. The Olympics and the Super Bowl boosted Comcast’s revenue by about $1.5 billion in the quarter.
(Updates with analyst comment in fourth paragraph.)
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