Charter (CHTR) Q4 Earnings Top Estimates, Revenues Rise Y/Y
Charter Communications CHTR reported fourth-quarter 2020 earnings of $6.50 per share that beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 22.7% and jumped 84.5% year over year.
Revenues of $12.6 billion increased 7.3% on a year-over-year basis, owing to growth in Internet, mobile and advertising segments. The figure marginally beat the consensus mark by 0.5%.
Segmental Details
Residential revenues came in at $9.72 billion, up 5% from the year-ago quarter.
Monthly residential revenues per customer (excluding mobile) totaled $111.85, down 1.7% year over year.
Internet revenues grew 11.9% year over year to $4.86 billion driven by growth in Internet customers, promotional rate step-ups and rate adjustments.
Video revenues fell 1.2% to $4.4 billion due to lower pay-per-view and video on demand revenues and lower installation revenues, partly offset by rate adjustments and promotional rate step-ups.
Moreover, voice revenues decreased 0.2% to $449 million due to a decline in wireline voice customers over the last 12 months.
Charter Communications, Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise
Charter Communications, Inc. price-consensus-eps-surprise-chart | Charter Communications, Inc. Quote
Commercial revenues improved 1% year over year to $1.6 billion driven by SMB and enterprise revenue growth. Small and medium business revenues came in at $997 million, up 1.1% year over year, reflecting customer relationship growth.
Enterprise revenues increased 0.9% to $623 million. Enterprise revenue growth was impacted by lower cell tower backhaul and other wholesale revenues. Enterprise retail revenues excluding wholesale revenues increased 5.4% year over year, reflecting PSU growth.
Fourth-quarter advertising sales revenues of $625 million increased 43.9% year over year, driven by higher political revenues and advanced advertising, partly offset by lower local sales.
Mobile revenues surged 80.9% year over year to $428 million. Other revenues came in at $222 million, up 1.5% year over year.
Subscriber Statistics
As of Dec 31, 2020, Charter had 31.1 million total customer relationships, with 1.9 million customers added in 2020. The figure increased 6.5% year over year.
Moreover, the company had 29.079 million residential Internet customers, up 6.6% year over year.
As of Dec 31, 2020, over 85% of residential Internet customers subscribed to tiers that provided 100 Mbps or more of speed, and over 50% subscribed to tiers that provided 200 Mbps or more of speed. During the fourth quarter, Charter doubled its starting download speed to 200 Mbps in 17 markets.
Charter added 216K residential Internet customers in the reported quarter.
Further, Charter added 315K mobile lines in the fourth quarter. As of Dec 31, 2020, the company served a total of 2.4 million mobile lines. However, the company lost 120K voice customers in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Operating Details
Total operating costs and expenses increased 5.5% from the year-ago quarter to $7.63 billion.
Programming costs increased 3.6% year over year to $2.9 billion due to a rise in renewals and contractual programming. Regulatory, connectivity and produced-content costs were down 10.7% to $532 million.
Costs to service customers increased 4.4% year over year to $1.8 billion. Marketing costs were $758 million, up 1.4% year over year.
Notably, mobile costs jumped 40.5% year over year to $522 million.
Adjusted EBITDA increased 10.2% year over year to $4.9 billion. Moreover, adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 110 basis points (bps) to 39.6%.
Balance Sheet & Cash Flow
As of Dec 31, 2020, cash and cash equivalents were $998 million compared with $1.28 billion as of Sep 30, 2020. The company’s credit facilities provided roughly $4.7 billion of additional liquidity.
Further, as of Dec 31, 2020, total debt was $82.1 billion compared with debt of $79.1 billion as of Sep 30.
Cash flows from operating activities totaled $4.41 billion compared with $3.35 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Property, plant and equipment expenditures totaled $2.1 billion in the reported quarter compared with $2.3 billion in the year-ago quarter, primarily driven by declines in scalable infrastructure and support spending.
Free cash flow was $2.1 billion compared with $1.6 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider
Currently, Charter carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
MSG Networks Inc. MSGN, News Corporation NWSA and TakeTwo Interactive Software, Inc. TTWO are some better-ranked stocks in the broader consumer discretionary sector, each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
MSG Networks, News Corporation and Take-Two Interactive are set to report their quarterly results on Feb 2, Feb 4 and Feb 8, respectively.
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