Cable giant Charter Communications, in which John Malone’s Liberty Broadband owns a large stake, released its second-quarter results on Friday, including the latest subscriber trends.
The company, led by chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge, lost 226,000 pay-TV subscribers last quarter, compared with a loss of 50,000 in the same period a year earlier.
Charter’s broadband customer growth slowed in the second quarter as it lost 21,000 customers after gaining 400,000 in the same period a year earlier.
Routledge, during a morning call with analysts, commented on the company navigating the threat of a national economic slowdown and its impact on consumer spending. “We remain well positioned, with growth driven by offering value-rich packages that differentiate our competition at prices customers can afford regardless of the economic environment,” he said.
Cable, cellular and broadband providers faced consumers and small and medium businesses recovering from the COVID-19 crisis, only to face inflationary pressures as another economic crisis loomed. “Our fatal and pessimistic reading?” Rutledge said at one point when she began answering an analyst’s question about how Charter would respond to rising inflation in the downturn in the US economy.
“We can operate in a difficult economic environment and we can make our products valuable to customers. I prefer to operate in the usual business environment, but we have very good assets and very good opportunities to succeed,” says Rutledge. Charter executives pointed to inflationary pressures on labor costs and rising bad debt costs in the company’s operating environment. At the same time, customer turnover is low, the company says.
In the most recent quarter, broadband customers in its residential and SMB segments grew by a total of 38,000 when we exclude 59,000 “outages related to the termination of the Emergency Broadband Benefits program and the Connect Program add-on requirements.” Accessible”. The company previously warned that these changes to government programs that help consumers get internet service would result in the shipment of 60,000 to 70,000 customers during the period.
On Thursday, Comcast said its broadband customer base stagnated in the second quarter.
When asked earlier this year why Charter outperforms its peers in terms of video subscribers, Rutledge said: “We’ve put a lot of effort into this, on the one hand. and we tried [add] Value, whenever we can, for the customer”. He added: “There is still opportunity in the video. And one of the things we’ve been successful at is creating complementary packaging and a mix of video products that we actually sell to consumers.”
Cable stocks have been hit hard in recent months amid challenges in broadband, a long-running booming business, with some Wall Street analysts predicting some cable companies could lose broadband customers in the April period. to June.
At the end of June, Charter had nearly 30.25 million total broadband customers and nearly 15.50 million total video subscribers.
Charter also added 344,000 cell phone lines in the second quarter, up from 265,000 in the same period last year. June ended with 4.3 million mobile lines.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
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