Comcast Corp. CMCSA -3.33% posted a 6.9% rise in fourth-quarter net profit, boosted by continued growth at its broadband business, while the coronavirus pandemic continued to pressure its movie and theme-park units.
The virus has forced millions of Americans to work and learn from home, increasing their reliance on their internet providers, and led many movie theaters to shut down and theme parks to operate at limited capacity.
Philadelphia-based Comcast—owner of Xfinity-branded services, the NBCUniversal media empire and the Sky television business—posted fourth-quarter net profit of $3.38 billion, or 73 cents a share, beating FactSet analyst estimates. Revenue slipped 2.4% to $27.71 billion.
Comcast said it added 538,000 broadband customers during the quarter, helping the company’s cable segment—which includes iXfinity-branded internet, cable-TV, phone and mobile services—post a 6.3% rise in revenue to $15.7 billion. Comcast added two million broadband customers last year, a record.
The company’s Universal Studios theme parks suffered a 63% drop in revenue to $579 million, though Comcast said the unit broke even last quarter when excluding the pre-opening costs associated with its Beijing Resort.
NBCUniversal and Entertainment
Revenue at NBCUniversal’s film segment was down 8.3% to $1.43 billion. The exclusion of costs related to the rollout and marketing of movies, as well as the release of some films on demand, helped to stanch losses.
Comcast continued to lose TV subscribers, with defections hitting 248,000 in the fourth quarter. The company lost 1.4 million cable-TV customers in 2020. Comcast and its peers have bled customers who in recent years have cut the cord in favor of streaming services such as Netflix Inc. On Wednesday, AT&T Inc. said it wrote down $15.5 billion on its pay-TV business as DirecTV and U-verse customers continued to flee.
Last year, Comcast entered the streaming wars with NBCUniversal’s Peacock. The company said it has had 33 million sign-ups but declined to say how many of them came from nonexisting customers choosing to subscribe to the streaming service. Peacock’s premium version is free to Comcast pay-TV and broadband customers as well as those of Cox Communications Inc.
Comcast said its U.K.-based Sky unit continued to rebound, thanks to the return of live sports, primarily European soccer. Sky, like NBCUniversal’s businesses, disproportionately suffered at the outset of the pandemic when live sports were halted. The unit reported $5.2 billion in revenue, up 3.3%. Comcast said Sky is close to having as many customers as it did before the pandemic hit.
Write to Lillian Rizzo at [email protected]
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