Charter Communications bucked the trend of basic video customer losses in the fourth quarter, adding 2,000 residential subscribers in the period – a big improvement over a loss of 51,000 in the prior year, as revenue and cash flow growth was in line with peers.
Adding in business video customers and Charter added about 15,000 homes in the period, compared to Comcast which lost about 33,000 video subscribers in its fourth quarter.
Residential high-speed data additions were slower in the period – 263,000 compared to 357,000 in 2016. Charter also added 22,000 residential voice service customers, down from the 39,000 it added in 2016.
Revenue increased 3.2% to $10.6 billion and cash flow was up 3.3% to about $4 billion in the quarter. For the full year, revenue increased 3.9% to $41.6 billion and cash flow rose 5.8% to $15.3 billion.
“2017 was a transitional year for Charter. We accomplished our key goals of launching our pricing and packaging across our new company, and progressed as planned to unify our service delivery platform into a single entity from the multiple instances we inherited from our M&A transactions,” Charter chairman and CEO Tom Rutledge said in a statement “In 2018, we remain focused on completing our service integration and launching new products to accelerate customer relationship, revenue and EBITDA growth.”
