Quarterly revenues for Comcast dropped nearly 12% compared to the same time last year and its net income was down more than 4% as the company navigates the pandemic — but the cable company’s wireless segment saw strong growth of more than 33% in revenues and Comcast reported its second-best quarter in 13 years in terms of high-speed internet customer numbers.
Revenue for the quarter was $23.7 billion, with net income at $3 billion. For Comcast’s Cable Communications unit, revenue was basically flat year-over-year as the gains in wireless and high-speed internet revenues offset losses in advertising, voice and video. Wireless had the best revenue growth among its cable communications businesses, at 33.9%. High-speed internet revenues were up more than 7% and business service revenues were up 3.6% compared to the same quarter of 2019. Comparatively, Comcast saw revenue drops in video revenues (-3.2%) and voice (-10.7%), and a steep drop of almost 30% in advertising revenues.
Comcast reported that Xfinity Mobile now has nearly 2.4 million wireless lines, up from about 1.6 million at this time last year. Net additions for the quarter were 126,000. Total customer relationships for Comcast are around 32.1 million, the company reported. Comcast added 323,000 net high speed customers, not including an additional 600,000 high-risk or free Internet Essentials customers.
Capital expenditures for Comcast’s Cable Communications segment decreased nearly 9% to $1.5 billion for the quarter, which the company said was due to “decreased investment in customer premise equipment, partially offset by increased investment in scalable infrastructure.” NBCUniversal saw an even steeper drop in capex of nearly 21% compared to the same period last year; that segment’s revenues plunged 25% year-over-year to $6.1 billion, driven largely by pandemic-related losses from the company’s theme parks, film segment and cable networks.
