Latest news with #Greengart
Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
How Comcast is trying to turn around its internet customer exodus
Comcast, the Philadelphia-born media giant with roots in cable television, for years has been losing more cable customers than it's been adding. And more recently, with leaders citing "a highly competitive environment," it's also lost broadband internet customers. So this year, the company set in motion multiple new strategies to court consumers. In the broadband and mobile businesses, that meant offering a national pricing structure, five-year price guarantees, a free mobile line for a year, and unlimited data packages for mobile customers. The company also honed in on customer service, making it possible to buy products in fewer steps, and using Google AI to manage customer interactions, Comcast president Mike Cavanagh said in a quarterly earnings call late last month. He boasted "more than a 20% improvement in purchase conversion rates." Comcast isn't facing a unique challenge. Cable on the whole is "in terminal decline" across operators, said consumer technology industry analyst Avi Greengart, but broadband "was propping them up." Now, he said, "that is also starting to decline due to higher competition, particularly from fixed wireless." "Comcast is trying to find a route that protects themselves from that," Greengart said. Despite the customer losses in the most recent quarter, leaders at Comcast, which has 14,000 employees in the Philadelphia region and 8,500 at its Center City headquarters, were upbeat about the future of their internet business. "Our goal for all the actions we've taken is to build a loyal customer base that churns less and values our services more," Cavanagh said. "Customers are responding to the simplicity and power of these changes, with roughly half of our eligible new customer connects choosing our five-year price guarantee this quarter." Comcast is also unlike the others in cable and internet, thanks to additional business segments like theme parks and movie studios. Those aren't easy businesses, Greengart said, but they're "hit-driven" and currently benefiting from a new movie and Orlando theme park. And more changes taking place in rapid succession. Within one week in July, Comcast made several significant announcements: a partnership with T-Mobile to bring wireless services to more business customers; the board members for its upcoming spinoff of several media brands including USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, and E!; and the launch of Stream Store, where its cable and internet customers can buy cheap streaming service bundles. "There are a lot of moving pieces at Comcast at the moment‚" wrote Craig Moffett, a telecom-industry analyst who has watched Comcast for years, in his take on the company's quarterly earnings report. "But most of those pieces are moving in the right direction." These moves line up with a growth strategy that pulls away from cable, with internet as the linchpin. Which Comcast services are growing? Comcast reported 201,000 fewer residential broadband customers in its most recent quarter, making for 594,000 fewer over the course of one year. Still, those numbers are a small percentage of the whole. More than 31.5 million U.S. homes and businesses get their broadband internet from Comcast and it remains the largest home internet provider in the country. The company has been betting on growth in that demand, pointing to entertainment as the reason for a majority of internet use. The mobile phone business gained customers - 378,000 more in the second quarter, driven in part by that free line offer. That customer base is still smaller than internet and even cable, with about 8.5 million total wireless lines. With the recently announced T-Mobile deal, which targets business users, the number of wireless users seems poised to grow more when that takes effect next year. (Comcast's residential wireless services use Verizon's network.) Wireless is a competitive space, too, Greengart acknowledged, "but this is an area that really fits with the cable operators' existing business models." Comcast doesn't have to operate the wireless networks but already has access to a large customer base, he said. And when customers' devices are set to switch data use from mobile networks to WiFi when available, the cost to Comcast becomes lower. Cable, meanwhile, continues to drop off. That customer base shrunk by 751,000 in the first half of 2025, dipping below 12 million. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said those declines are expected to continue. "There was a time when Comcast's media business was considered a drag on their consolidated results" Moffett wrote. "Well … today, media might still be viewed as a challenged business, but it is almost certainly viewed as being preferable to cable. Anything is viewed as preferable to cable." A future without cable is conceivable, Greengart said, if it becomes too costly for providers to justify. Despite the decline, Comcast still brings cable into about 11.7 million homes. Selling pro-basketball and family vacations When talking about Comcast's "core six growth drivers" in the quarterly earnings call, CFO Jason Armstrong did not mention cable. But that's not to say Comcast is stepping back from the business of bringing moving pictures to TV screens. In addition to broadband, wireless, and business services, Armstrong listed three other "growth" areas: parks, streaming, and studios. Those three still bring in much less revenue than the cable and internet businesses. But they've made splashy moves. The Peacock streaming service isn't yet profitable, but it's getting closer and will be adding NBA games to its menu in the fall. And with its newest theme park, Epic Universe in Orlando, the company is building out what Cavanagh called "a true weeklong destination" to compete with the nearby Disney resort. "Not many companies on the planet could take the decade it took to build maybe the finest theme park in the world," CEO Brian Roberts said on the recent earnings call. Those six "growth" businesses now bring in nearly 60% of Comcast's revenue, Roberts noted. That will increase to about 65% after the company spins off its cable network entities into a separate company, Versant. If trends continue, Roberts predicted, those six segments will eventually make up 70% of Comcast's revenue within a few years. "We're pivoting; our products are exciting," Roberts said. "And the way we tell that story to the consumer with some of the team that we're assembling, I think you're going to see that really resonate." Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
The Verge
18-06-2025
- Business
- The Verge
How Donald Trump and Ryan Reynolds can easily sell you phone plans
Blame Ryan Reynolds. With a new wireless brand from the hosts of SmartLess emerging last week, and the debut of Trump Mobile this week, it sure seems like there's a hot new trend in Celebrities Selling Things: phone service. How did it come to this? Why can't they just stick to tequila? I talked to a couple of experts about the situation, and it's not entirely the Deadpool actor's fault. But also: it is kind of his fault. To be clear, none of these celebrities / political figures are building new cell networks from scratch. What they're launching are Mobile Virtual Network Operators, or MVNOs. These are companies that buy wireless service from the three big US carriers and re-sell it. It's a business model that has existed for decades, Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart tells me. 'They address market segments that carriers can't or don't want to address with their main brands,' he says. Older customers, people whose first language isn't English, people with bad credit — they're all prime targets for MVNOs. It's an attractive arrangement for the big carriers since they may have extra network capacity that would otherwise go unused. 'They get a guaranteed return on their network investment,' Greengart says. 'If you're T-Mobile for example, you might have spare capacity on the network that you've built. So it makes sense to basically rent some of it out.' 'Mint Mobile proved that you could build the business if you could generate your own audience.' MVNOs may be decades old, but I can't shake the feeling that I've been hearing about them a lot more recently. Gerrit Schneemann at Counterpoint Research says that 5G may be partially behind that. The additional capacity that 5G allows compared to LTE is helping more MVNOs get off the ground. 'Having 5G networks available, you have the capacity to actually run these [MVNOs] and to some extent, may not be as capacity constrained in some places,' Schneemann says. On top of that, MVNOs are more attractive to customers than ever. The rise of eSIM technology has also helped reduce the friction in signing up for an MVNO, Schneemann says. Also, since we're handling more and more of the services we use every day strictly online, people are also probably more willing to sign up for an MVNO than they were five or six years ago. And then there's the Ryan Reynolds of it all. In 2019 he bought an ownership stake in Mint Mobile, an MVNO using the T-Mobile network, and became the brand's spokesperson. The combination of clever ads and a unique pricing model won a lot of people over and turned it into a lucrative venture for Reynolds, who sold the business to T-Mobile — the company that was already running Mint's network — in a deal worth up to $1.35 billion. Greengart thinks that was a tipping point for the MVNO business, or at least, the celebrities-backing-MVNOs business. 'Mint Mobile proved that you could build the business if you could generate your own audience … And that has attracted other people who have or can create audiences.' That's how we wound up living in a world where the President's family's company sells wireless service, which I don't think is a scenario any of the Founding Fathers could have foreseen. And as weird as that concept is, Greengart thinks it's kind of a natural fit for Trump's whole business ethos. 'The Trump Organization is a branding operation, even in real estate.' He points to the company's licensing business model of charging developers to use the Trump name on their projects — without having to risk its own money on it. 'That's kind of what an MVNO is,' Greengart adds. Where there's a captive audience, there's a marketing opportunity; so the saying goes. Or something like that. Either way, I don't think this is the last time we'll hear from a public figure ready to sell us wireless service. Guess we have Ryan Reynolds to thank for that.
