Nervous investors get a gift. company may buy Plaxo
Comcast's stock has taken a beating of late for a variety of reasons. All the talk of FiOS has many of them worried, as did the looming (and so far
unfounded) rumor that the company was interested in making a major wireless broadband play. But the company's fussy investors got a gift this morning with Comcast's
fourth quarter earnings results, which bested most analysts' estimates. The company reported higher than expected profit for Q4, and announced a new
annual dividend payout for shareholders.
quote:
Comcast Corp. announced plans for its first dividend in nearly a decade and committed to a timeline for buying back nearly $7 billion in stock, a salve to investor complaints the cable giant isn't friendly to shareholders. The moves Thursday come as Comcast's stock price has withered and just a month after one of the company's biggest investors accused Comcast of a litany of missteps and called on the company to commit to shareholder givebacks, including a dividend.
While the company continued the industry-wide trend of losing basic video customers with 94,000 departures, Comcast added 523,000 digital video subscribers. The company also added 331,000 broadband customers, and continued their dominance of the VoIP industry by adding 475,000 VoIP customers. There's some interesting
additional commentary by Larry Dignan over at ZDNet, who insists that $42.44 is the number consumers should be watching:
quote:
That sum, which was disclosed in Comcast’s fourth quarter earnings (Techmeme), is the company’s monthly average revenue per subscriber–a metric that would indicate pricing pressure from the likes of Verizon and AT&T...Comcast’s fourth quarter average revenue per subscriber was down from $42.86 in the third quarter and $42.89 a year ago. Simply put, increased competition has cost Comcast 42 cents in lost revenue on average. Perhaps, that saved you about 42 cents off your bill in the last three months.
As we've noted, AT&T and Verizon are by and large engaging in non-price competition with Comcast, a benefit of a market that maintains the illusion of competition, but in reality offers very little. As an aside, we're seeing
rumblings this morning that Comcast, ever afraid of the dumb pipe, is buying social networking outfit
Plaxo.