Comcast at Citi’s Conference: Strategic Growth Drivers

On Thursday, 04 September 2025, Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) presented its strategic plans at Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. CFO Jason Armstrong outlined the company’s ambitious goals to enhance revenue growth, focusing on six core areas. While Comcast aims for substantial growth, it faces challenges such as competitive pressures in broadband and the need to balance shareholder returns with reinvestment.

Key Takeaways

• Comcast targets increasing the revenue share of its six core growth drivers to 70% in the next few years.
• The company is investing in customer experience and network upgrades through Project Genesis.
• Comcast plans to continue significant capital returns to shareholders while reinvesting in growth.
• Streaming services, particularly Peacock, are key growth areas with recent price hikes contributing to profitability.
• The company is actively optimizing its portfolio with strategic divestitures like the Versant spin-off and the sale of Sky Germany.

Financial Results

• Revenue growth is driven by six key areas: wireless, broadband, business services, parks, streaming, and studios, currently making up 60% of Comcast’s revenue.
• Comcast aims to increase this share to 70% through strategic actions.
• Business services revenue stands at 10 billion dollars, with healthy growth in both revenue and EBITDA.
• Since 2021, Comcast has returned 62 billion dollars to shareholders and plans to continue this trend.
• Peacock has reached 41 million domestic subscribers, with a recent 3-dollar rate increase settling well.

Operational Updates

• Broadband consumption is up 10% year-over-year, with significant growth in connected devices.
• Wireless services are leveraging extensive WiFi hotspots, aiming for another record quarter.
• Business services are experiencing mid-single-digit growth, with high margins and additional service uptake.
• Streaming shows strong subscriber growth, driven by a robust content lineup including NFL and NBA.
• Project Genesis is improving network performance, with positive early signs in repair efficiency.

Future Outlook

• Comcast anticipates healthy ARPU growth in broadband, focusing on total convergence revenue.
• Wireless monetization within the broadband base presents new opportunities.
• Streaming aims for increased subscribers through unique content and engagement.
• Parks expansion includes the launch of Epic Universe in the U.S. and plans for a similar park in the UK.

Q&A Highlights

• Comcast has implemented national pricing and simplified offers to enhance broadband competitiveness.
• The MVNO strategy in wireless remains strong, with potential infrastructure additions if needed.
• Capital allocation will continue focusing on shareholder returns and reinvestment in growth areas.
• The Versant spin-off is positioned with a strong management team and healthy cash flow.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference:

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Is for Citi clients only. Welcome back to Citi’s global twenty twenty five TMT conference. For those of you I haven’t met, I’m Mike Rollins, and I cover communication services and infrastructure for Citi. We do have disclosures available at the back of the room. And if you don’t have access or would like another copy, please email me at michael.rollins@Citi.com.

We’re pleased to welcome back Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer of Comcast. Jason, thank you so much for being with us today.

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Mike, thanks for having Comcast.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Great. Well, maybe just to get us started, what are the opportunities for Comcast to sustain annual financial growth, revenue, EBITDA and earnings from your portfolio of assets, especially your six key growth businesses as they increase their contribution to total revenue?

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Yes. Well, thanks for starting there. I think it’s important. We’re totally focused on revenue growth. And I think you framed it as how do we sustain it.

I would say we’re aiming to do better than that. We want to reaccelerate revenue growth. In the last couple of years, obviously, you’ve seen revenue growth decelerate a little bit. We have, I think, articulated a very clear strategy, that’s sort of what the company is centered around both for external clarity and internal clarity as well. And as you mentioned, six core growth drivers that we see in large scaled markets, secular growth markets, profitable markets or path to profitability markets, where we’ve got a real right to win.

So those are the businesses we’re focused on. Represents about 60% of our revenue stream right now. There’s been a couple of those businesses that have seen a revenue deceleration: broadband, which is more competitive parks, which was unwind a little bit from the experience category sort of post pandemic peaks and then coming off of that a little bit, but that’s more temporary. And then there’s the other 40% of what we do, which are businesses that are largely cash generative, but they’re not growing, right? And so either they are cash generative and in service of the other businesses or they are we’re looking at are they separable and are there other options.

So if you look at over the course of this past year, we’ve taken sort of two actions. We’ve got a spin off of our cable networks in the form of Versant, which is coming right around the end of this year. And then Sky Germany, we’re in the process of selling that as well. So if you look at this, this mix was sort of fifty-fifty several years ago. Now it’s sixty-forty.

I would tell you with these actions and with underlying growth in the 60% category, we’ll be at seventy-thirty in the next couple of years. And so that’s the path we’ve been driving on. I think the key for us is how do you take each of these six and ensure they’re on the right path? That’s really been the priority. So if you tick through them, there’s three on the connectivity side.

There’s three on the content side. On the connectivity side of the business, maybe I’d start with wireless, it’s the biggest addressable market. As you stare at addressable markets, we’re in and around what the size of the sandboxes are. That’s the largest one. It also happens to be the one where we kind of have the smallest share, out of the six.

And so that’s a huge category for us. It’s one where we’ve been leaning in. I’m sure we’ll talk more about it. We’re happy with the progress we’re making. I think we’ve made a lot of progress to date, but there was room to do a lot more and really accelerate what we’re doing.

And we’re sort of in the middle of that process right now and seeing, you know, another quarter of good results there. Broadband, is the second category. This is as you step back, it’s a more competitive environment. At the same time, this is a secular growth market. If you look at what’s happening with the average consumer, they are consuming more on a monthly basis.

That’s up roughly 10% year over year. We’re over 800 gigs per customer per month. They are hanging more devices off their network substantially more than they were even five years ago. And if you look around the universe, whether it’s the cable universe or fiber, ARPUs are up, right? And for fiber, they’re up actually pretty significantly.

So the overall umbrella in terms of what you’re competing in and what the opportunity is for broadband is positive. Now we’re defending an incumbent position. We’ve made a lot of pivots this year to readdress how we go to market. I think it’s resonating. We’re seeing some success there.

But nonetheless, this is a long term growth category for us. It has been historically, it will continue to be, we believe. Business services is sort of the last part of connectivity. That’s a $10,000,000,000 business, for us built from scratch from fifteen years ago. We’ve got a lot of different segments that sort of sit within that.

You’ve covered the industry for a really long period of time. You sort of know the segmentation, small business, medium, enterprise, government, a lot of different tiers to it. We’ve made a lot of progress in small business. We’re at the early stages on mid enterprise and government. So a lot of room to run there and inside of a secular growth bucket and a massive addressable market.

If you look at the content side of the business, maybe start with parks, I would put more broadly the experiences category as a large and growing category, especially coming out of COVID. Parks may be the most interesting category within experiences, and we have an incredible set of parks. And we’re one of two major companies out there, but we’re we’re the number two, but we’re the challenger as number two. And so recently launched Epic. We’re going to be launching a park in The UK.

We’re going to be launching smaller parks. We have a full pipeline on parks. Mark Woodbury was presenting at a conference yesterday and laid a lot of this out, and I I thought in a nice way. But nonetheless, parks is a category, which is a growth engine for us. You saw that in the second quarter.

You’ll see even more of it in the third quarter. Streaming, you know, a growth category for us. And if you look at the overall category, yeah, it’s been a growth category. There’s been questions on, okay, how can you scale into profitability and what’s the ultimate profit pool look like. We’re on a path to get there.

We’re on a path that we like. We closed the gap by another $250,000,000 last quarter. We’re making progress on the profitability side. But if you look at what we’ve done with Peacock, in, I believe, just under five years, 41,000,000 domestic subscribers, content lineup that between sports, movies, reality and a massive library really is resonating with the customer, and we’ve been able to take some price against that recently. But streaming, you know, clearly a growth category for us.

And then another one that sort of sits in the middle because it’s more of a flywheel is studios. And studios and success in studios is gonna be a function of how well your content resonates. And if you look at the past several years, we’ve been number one or number two in global box office. And so what that throws off in terms of licensing opportunities, consumer products opportunities, IP into our theme parks and how well it’s going to resonate with the consumer. I think all that positions us really well.

And so the goal and we’re in an investment period now for sure, we’ve articulated that. But the goal coming out of this is to really have this mix shift take over, have these six moving forward and be able to reaccelerate to the revenue growth.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Great. That gives us a lot to dig into. So maybe starting with broadband. You’re making a lot of strategic changes across your residential broadband business. Can you take us back to how you decided on the course of actions that you’re taking?

And then what gives you confidence that you’re on the right path? And then maybe just the other side of this is what is the definition of success when you get to the other side of what you’re trying to accomplish?

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: It’s a well framed question, especially the last one. That’s that’s, you know, what what is our North Star here, right, especially in an environment that’s been disrupted a little bit. So probably helpful to to rewind the clock and how did we get here, and then what have we done, and what are we aspiring to. If you rewind the clock, I would say, you know, we we always if if you go back a year when I was sitting here with you, if you go back two years, our our narrative around fiber would have been the same. Right?

We always expected to see two multi gig wires into the vast majority of our footprint. We’ve sort of never changed on that. That’s always been the planning assumption. Now fiber overbuilds tend to ebb and flow. As you’ve seen for the past twenty years, we’re in a period where, you know, there’s pretty intense fiber overbuilding at this point.

So maybe we get to the endpoint sooner than we thought, but the endpoint isn’t any different than what we thought, which is we’re expecting to see fiber across the vast majority of our footprint. I think a little bit the surprise has been the durability of fixed wireless. Fixed wireless has come in, and they’re not for everybody. It’s for a value conscious consumer that’s willing to make some trade offs on speed and reliability, but they’ve come in with an interesting value proposition for a segment of the market. Not always the best use of spectrum, so they’ve talked about this being a fallow capacity model.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s shifting a little bit. Nonetheless, this is going to be a permanent niche of the market, we think. And so that and that’s sort of been the narrative internally for the past several quarters, if not years. This is a permanent change in the competitive market.

And so then it’s how do you go compete against this and and in in this new reality. And so as we look at how we were competing, what we do well, what we do not so well, and what competitors have poked on, I’d put it in three buckets. So network, product, and experience. On the network side, our network broadly is gig plus capable right now. It’s on a path through our Genesys upgrade to be multi gig symmetrical.

So we’re we’re convinced that we’re, you know, we’ve got a leadership position. We’re right there with fiber from a network perspective right now. And to the extent the world’s going to multi gig symmetrical, we’ve got a capital efficient way of getting there, which we’re well down that path at this point. So network, we check the box very well. Product, which is in my mind sort of what you do in the home, right?

Gateways, coverage, control features, app based control for the average customer to see what’s actually on their network and maybe dictate who gets what in the home. We rank second to none. OpenSignal has us ranked as the number one company in reliability, in the home. So from a product perspective, we rank really well. There’s no gap there.

The experience category, for the most part, we do well. But to be fair, we had some gaps. So if you look at what, you know, in particular, fixed wireless has picked on it and where we get, you know, consumer feedback, it’s we want more pricing transparency from you guys and we want pricing stability. So it’s sort of two big metrics. Then it’s we want you to be easier to do business with.

So those are broad and important categories. So if you look at what we’ve done this year to get after that, is we’ve major pivots. So starts with national pricing. We’ve rolled everything up into just simplistic. There’s four categories depending on speeds.

And here’s the price, and it’s consistent. It’s national. It actually helps us from a marketing perspective as well. We were we had separate equipment charges, tax tax and fees. There were some, you know, unlimited data versus limited we’ve we’ve taken all that out of the picture and sort of said, here’s what you get.

It’s true unlimited data. It’s our equipment included. Our equipment rates is the best out there. So we want our equipment at homes. So equipment’s included.

And and we’ve we’ve launched one year and more importantly, five year price locks to give customers certainty and transparency. And so all that’s out there, at this point. In addition to that, we’ve said where else can we lean in to support broadband in a way that is helpful for us long term and supports revenue growth, and that’s wireless. So we’ve done a couple of different things on wireless. We’ve gone free line for a certain segment.

If you’ve heard of us, but you’re nervous about trying us, what better way to try us than take a free line for a year, and then we’ll hopefully convince you it’s worth sticking around, and we’ll monetize that at the one year plus mark. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got premium mobile plans that are out that really get after the traditional postpaid market from data allotments and handset availability. So we’re making a lot of progress there. I think as you step into this quarter, we’re continuing to see wireless momentum. We’re on pace for another record quarter this quarter.

And on the broadband side, I think we like what we’re seeing. It’s starting to resonate with customers. And so I think we’re confident we’re moving in the right direction. Now this has a cost. We’ve said this is an investment year, right?

So there are whether it’s five year price lock, free mobile lines or some of the investments in customer service we’re making, which we just moved on to the Google AI platform for customer interactions, it’s helping a lot. But all these things are a transition from a cost structure perspective. And so we’re making investments in that. The investments sort of we’re phasing into them. You’ll see more of that in the third quarter and fourth quarter into early next year.

We’ve said in that context, it’s going to be more difficult for us to be able to grow EBITDA this year. We’ve been very transparent about that for the last couple of quarters. We articulated the pivot that we’re going through. And so I would say the view is no different than that. You’ll start to see investments make their way into the system.

But to your question on the North Star, and where we end up, starting as early as second half of next year, we’ll be anniversarying investments. At the same time, a lot of these free wireless lines come up for monetization and we can roll those into paying relationships. And then fast forward even further beyond that, which you don’t have to go too far out, you’d say if the vast majority of our broadband customer base is on one year and more probably more five year rate lock plans where it’s you’re taking care of all the pain points, you’ve got your equipment included, you’ve got wireless bundled in that you can go monetize against a massive addressable market and your starting point So you got a lot of room to go between free and where the market currently sits. That’s a pretty good North Star, because that’s a real recipe for significant improvements in sort of customer satisfaction, but also a real runway for revenue growth.

And so that’s the way we see it. Obviously, there’s a transition period right now, but early signs are positive. And then at the one year plus mark, we think we’re set up really favorably.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: So when we pull all this together, you take the new promotions, the bundles, the price locks, how is it impacting the broadband ARPU? And maybe to kind of take it to a higher level, what’s the opportunity to continue to grow broadband revenue on an annual basis?

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Yeah. Well, I’d go back to, you know, what’s the category look like? That’s always the starting point for me. You know, I used to wear the analyst hat just like you did, and I was always, what’s what’s the macro environment and then how are you competing within that macro environment? So if you step back up to the macro environment, subscribers are growing at a macro level, customers are doing more in their home, they’re at 800 gigs at this point, that’s double digit growth year over year.

So clearly there’s more value that’s accruing to broadband, it’s moving its way continually up the utility stack for average customer. That’s a very good thing. They’re hanging more devices off their network. We’re seeing 40% more devices in the home connected to WiFi relative to five years ago. And competitors, in particular fiber, which really is the long term competitor in our view, you’re seeing ARPU growth in the mid to high single digit range.

That’s actually a very good thing for everybody involved in broadband and how we look at it. Now us specifically, the long term path is we’ll continue to grow broadband revenue, we’ll continue to grow broadband ARPU. Near term, I think we’ve been pretty transparent that a lot of the things we’re doing, whether it’s free wireless line or inclusion of equipment, are going to be headwinds to broadband ARPU growth. So you’ll start to see a little bit of that this quarter. At the same time, we put bookends around that and said, we still expect to be able to grow ARPU at a healthy rate.

So it’s while there’s a little bit of headwind coming, but that should be expected from any one of these changes, that’s how I’d step back and look at it. But more importantly, to your earlier point, you’ve written a lot about this. We’re really focused on sort of what is this what does the total convergence picture look like and what’s our role to play there. So as we step back and look at total convergence revenue, the ability to continue to grow broadband revenue, get pricing and packaging that really stabilizes the customer base, so we can turn around that metric, continue to grow ARPU, but then a huge amount of runway in wireless, which I think everything we’ve done recently, we were already on a path to monetize wireless at a pretty good rate. We’re with all the changes now, we’re on a path to more sort of make this a real part of the consideration set for every consumer out there.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: And one more on broadband. You mentioned Project Genesis earlier. So just curious, as you’re making the forward progress on upgrading the plant, are you seeing anything different from the markets that are getting Genesis and how customers are responding?

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Yes. Well, let me take everybody a step. Genesis is sort of our term for upgrading the network. And so our path was always going to be and is currently mid splits, which are foundational and then DOCSIS four point zero right after that. And that was the path to multi gig symmetrical speeds, you know, in every market we operate in.

So we are well down the path on mid splits. Majority of our footprint has it. We’re earlier stages on DOCSIS four point because mid splits was the foundation, four point zero was after that. But we’re starting to make progress on the four point zero launches. It’s early, but what we’re seeing in terms of repair calls, time to repair and all the things from a network layer are showing positive early signs.

To be fair, it’s very early, but the path this puts us on multi gig symmetrical is on par with anything out there. So as I said earlier, where are the gaps? From a network perspective, we’re equivalent to anything out there. We want to be best in class. Fiber’s got a reputation to sort of be there.

We’re right with them, right? And so and we want a network path that actually keeps us on that path as well. I think importantly, the secular characteristics are we continue to see usage growth. That’s a very good thing for us. We are if you look at our Genesis upgrade, it’s a capital efficient upgrade.

It leverages existing infrastructure, can be done in an efficient way and can handle a lot of incremental traffic. So as a low cost provider of marginal traffic, we want traffic growth. So the fact that we’re over 800 gigs, we’re growing double digits, we importantly see not just average tonnage increasing by that amount, but the peaks are increasing by that amount, which is important because if you think about covered networks for a longer period of time than I have, but it’s that’s where it really matters is where are the peaks hitting? Are you seeing peaks increase at the same rate that the average usage is? And the answer is yes.

I would point to, you know, tonight and tomorrow night, we’ve got, you know, some big new things back in the mix. So tonight, Thursday Night Football, Eagles, Cowboys coming back. That’ll be a big event for Peacock, obviously, and those things are always tests of network capacity. But those are the type of things we look forward to. Tomorrow night might be the even bigger one, quite frankly.

So it’s not on us. It’s on YouTube, but it it’s the Chiefs and Chargers. But any game involving the Chiefs, obviously, is kind of a spectacle. And that’s the first game that’s not behind a streaming paywall. It’s on YouTube.

Right? So as you think about the next peak in the network, I predict tomorrow might be the peak, right, the next peak that we see. And we look forward to that type of our network engineers have been all over it. We’ve been supplying additional port capacity, but we’re we’re ready for it. And I would predict others in the industry are sort of you know, a lot of others are sort of looking at it the same way, but there’s some that are more capacity constrained and really trying to manage capacity that that’s going to be more nerve wracking of that, right?

Whereas for us, it plays right to our sweet spot.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Maybe shifting over to wireless. Following on the announcement that AT and T is buying spectrum from EchoStar, does this effectively remove a facilities based option from your menu of future ways that you could operate within the wireless landscape? And maybe it’s an opportunity to discuss the durability of your wireless MVNO strategy. You mentioned earlier your expectations for that to continue to contribute.

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Yes. So listen, wireless, we’ve got a pretty incredible path into wireless, which was an MVNO negotiated from a position of strength, which has worked for us. I mean, obviously, we’ve been at wireless for quite a period of time, seven plus years at this point. We’ve scaled revenue. We’ve also scaled profitability on the back of that, so firmly profitable.

But then we make decisions on the back of that. Do we maximizing EBITDA or are we maximizing the contribution to overall connectivity and helping support the broadband business? And I think the answer is more of the latter. It’s not to say we can’t be profitable in wireless, we will be, but in support of broadband as well as sort of a primary objective. Our path on the network side, we’ve got a strong MVNO, but saying that we’re a huge infrastructure player, obviously.

We’ve got over 20,000,000 WiFi hotspots out there that are act as many access points, act as many cell towers, quite frankly. And so if you look at the offloading potential that we have and the reality, we’re offloading greater than 90% of traffic. So what customers are doing on their cellular phones, 90% is already accommodated by our own infrastructure. The wireless industry on average is sort of in the low to mid-80s, on that metric. So we happen to be advantaged on the infrastructure side already.

To the extent we wanted to do more, a lot of this plays into our hands. We’ve got a spectrum position. We’ve got deep capillary networks. We’ve got powering. So to the extent we wanted to go strand mount antennas, we’d have the opportunity to do that on a broader basis.

And then it just becomes it’s quite frankly just a math exercise, right? Where do you see concentrations of capacity? And is it better to offload on an MVNO? Or is it better to drop in access points and offload? And we get every day that goes by as we scale the wireless business, you get more and more data in terms of where these traffic aggregation points are and the heat map of what’s busy and what’s not busy, and your actions can be informed by that.

But saying that, we’ve got a very good MVNO, and we’re happy with the MVNO. We’ve other partners, because they’ve seen sort of the success. If you look at our current MVNO partner and what it’s meant for their revenue, EBITDA and cash flow trajectory, it’s been a significant contributor. So that’s attracted other people to look at this and we’ve announced recently T Mobile is coming in on the business side. So I think we’re happy with where we are that the wireless business, as I mentioned, we continue to accelerate.

There hasn’t been as people look at how do you go take on wireless really fully in your territory, I would say there’s really no gap on the product side, right? We are there from a network perspective. We offloaded a higher rate. We sell into our own broadband base, which has huge acquisition cost advantages versus the wireless industry. So no real limitations there.

Second question you get into, though, is is the awareness there in your community. Right? And so or do people, when they think wireless, they’re still in big three mode? And I think that’s a very fair question. We’ve made a lot of progress, but I think we came into this year saying, we can go accelerate this.

And so let’s go attack this from two sides. How about free line for anybody that hasn’t explored what our product is? What better way to do it than a free line? And then for the if there was any question in our ability to serve the real true high value postpaid market, we’re coming in with premium plans that are they’re $40 but that’s still a discount to where the postpaid industry is. So it’s savings versus where you’d otherwise be.

But that is full fledged data allotments, that’s handset upgrade eligibility. So that is very much a competitor in the postpaid world. I And think we’re seeing really good early signs on that. We set a record for wireless sub adds in the second quarter. We’ll be there again in the third quarter.

So really good underlying momentum in that business.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: And maybe rounding out the connectivity conversation on the business segment. You referenced earlier the opportunity in mid enterprise and government. What are the products and the opportunities to accelerate share gains from those customer verticals?

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Yep. And shame on me. I should have started with business services. This is one that’s always through the last question in connectivity. And at one point, we’re going to flip this.

It’s 25% of what we do in connectivity. It’s growing at a very healthy clip. It’s been growing mid single digits for the past several quarters in both revenue and EBITDA terms. I would split it into it’s effectively two different markets. One is small business, which very much looks like and resembles residential, especially at the lower end of small business.

We’ve been at that for fifteen years. We started at zero. Now we’re in a lot of our markets, incumbent provider in small business. So we’ve made a ton of progress there. We are it’s a business that’s more competitive now at this point.

Fixed wireless is sort of making its mark at the very low end of small business. But for the higher tiers of small business, they care a ton about reliability. They actually care more about the consumer base because their livelihood is on the transactions generated on their small business and that is network connectivity, Reliant. So, we’re positioned very well, but we’re driving ARPU growth there that’s not really coming from underlying pricing. It’s coming from additional services.

So the average connectivity client for every dollar of connectivity revenue, a couple of years ago, were taking $0.20 of additional services or advanced services. Now they’re taking $0.50 and that continues to grow. So we’ve got a real opportunity in small business to do more with existing customers. And then the medium, high and government sections, we’re still very new there. But if you look at the across the category, network, product, sales force, which is different than residential, so that’s sort of the additional thing you have to have to go serve that market.

We’re the new game in town. We’re the ones that are growing. We’re the ones coming in with really strong product set and new energized sales force. And we’ve been winning a lot of share. So that’s actually the bigger growth engine within the Business Services segment.

And we’ve had a lot of success right out of the gates, but the underlying connectivity base, we keep having customers come back to us and saying, we love what you’re doing at the foundational layer. How about you do more in SD WAN? And when we ask ourselves, can we build that internally? Or should we go find the product specialist out there that we can buy and then go monetize across our entire base and have it be an immediately accretive transaction? The decision there was inorganic, and we bought a company called Maesergy.

The same question came up a year ago, where company said, we really want carrier aggregation in place and for you to help us with that. Question was, can we do that internally and how fast? Or is there a company out there that might be interesting? And so that was result was the acquisition of Nitell about a year ago. And so we’re on a path that’s an accretive path.

This is a business that at $10,000,000,000 in revenue generates over well over 50% margins. So a lot of cash coming out of this business and tremendous runway for growth.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Maybe flipping over to streaming. You referenced a little of this earlier. You got a very busy sports lineup coming up over the next several months. So NFL, NBA, Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, what are the opportunities to accelerate subscriber growth, pardon the pun, with all these shots on goal that you’ll have? And how do we think about the investment side as well as you’re approaching the start of this NBA deal, and you might have to ingest some cost from that?

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Yes. We’ll certainly be ingesting NBA costs starting in the fourth quarter. So that’s the right place to start. But streaming more broadly, and I would broaden it out to we’re really running the streaming business plus think about broadcast, which is what’s going remain broadcast and Bravo out of the linear businesses. But if you want to think about what relates into streaming from a sports perspective, you mentioned the pipeline we have coming, I would think about those two sort of together.

And you’re right, we’ve got an incredible pipeline. So NFL, where Sunday Night Football has been sort of the dominant rated category within the NFL, so the highest rated of the highest rated category. NBA, which we have coming first time back in twenty years, but an incredible lineup coming with the NBA, college football, the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics. It’s the greatest sort of content lineup we’ve had in a very long period of time that’s sort of coming at us in the next six months. So that’ll be on both sides of the business.

If you think about the advertising side, we were out there already talking about our upfront. But if you just sort of say, what’s the sports upfront done? This has been the most successful sports upfront in the company’s history by a good margin. So ton of progress there. We put out some stats yesterday on the NFL and sort of the progress we’ve made there, where the regular season’s already on pace.

This is mostly Sunday night football, but we’ll include the Thursday night football game tonight. We’re already on pace to, you know, exceed anything we’ve ever seen in our twenty year history in terms of gross receipts for the NFL. So very strong start there. Then you get into the subscriber side and whether it’s on broadcast and how this relates to future distribution deals, which is going to relate to how important is your content. We feel very good about the content portfolio.

And then if you look at streaming, we scaled to 41,000,000 customers, but now we’ve got an incredible content lineup coming up from here, which NFL is always a driver, NBA will be a new driver for us. And so as you look at the opportunity for additional subscribers, that’s always going to be driven by do you have relevant and unique content. So that ultimately feeds into subscriber growth. But then ultimately, the monetization of streaming is going to be a function of subscribers and engagement, right? That’s going to drive your monetization over time.

And I think we feel very strongly about the sort of content hand that we have coming up. And then there’s a how relevant are you to consumers and do you have an opportunity against that to drive price a little bit higher? And we took a $3 rate hike about a month ago. It seems to be landing very well. So I think we’re happy with that, how that’s settled out.

And then on the engagement side, with the pipeline we have coming, with our strength in reality, with our movie slate, just kind of the those are the three big categories for Peacock. I think we’ve got a very strong outlook. The NBA, we’re going to have to absorb those costs, right? So and we’re sort of full freight on year one, so they’re hitting us starting in the fourth quarter. But the monetization engines we have against that, the NBA is a young, broad, diverse audience, right, that looks a little bit like what we have in football, but it’s sort of different in many ways as well.

So this will give us yet another lever. We’re out of the gate strong on the advertising side. We expect to drive subscription growth. And this was a big part of how we could land a price hike, which we just took about a month ago, and it’s landing very well. So all the monetization mechanisms you’d expect are in place against the NBA.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: And maybe switching over to capital allocation. You mentioned the spin earlier. Do you have an update just in terms of cap structure or any other details that we should be mindful of around the Versant spin?

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Yes. I think our the Versant spin, I’d step back and say this is part of a strategy where we’ve said for the other 40%, are there other ways we can run these businesses, right? And either they’re cash generative and permanently in support of the existing businesses and the existing growth businesses or they’re separable, right? And we came to the conclusion these businesses were separable, saying that in spinning it off, we want it really well positioned. And we’ve gone out of our way to sort of say, how do you do that?

Conservatively leveraged. So I won’t give you the number, but the Form 10 will be out there shortly. So that will be Versant’s strategy, their capital structure and then they’re going to be on the road talking to everybody once the Form 10 is out. And so I’ll let them sort of articulate that. But with a focused and strong management team with pretty healthy free cash flow that comes out of those businesses and with a conservative capital structure, they’re going to have a lot of options.

At the same time, it really helps clarify who we are and really continue to point us towards these six growth drivers and take the mix that’s exposed to that higher.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: And is there an update on how Comcast is thinking about M and A and the ways in which you could further optimize the portfolio beyond the opportunities you mentioned earlier?

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: I think the portfolio optimization, hopefully, we’ve sort of answered that question over the course of the year and even in this discussion. We’ve taken a bunch of actions this year. So whether it’s shrinking the 40% and figuring out inorganic ways to do that with a spin off of Versant, scale the sale of the German business and continuing to focus on we’ve got six core growth drivers. That’s opportunities to invest across the six. Most of it’s organic.

But if you look at what you were just saying, Epic Universe is the biggest new park to launch in The U. S. In several decades. Extremely technologically sophisticated park, really good feedback so far. So really happy with the pipeline and parks.

And if you look at from here, we’ve got a UK park coming that will be on a similar scale to Epic. We’ve got some smaller things coming in Halloween Horror Nights opportunities, Horror Unleashed and then a kids’ park in Texas. And so we’ve got different sort of categories we’re punching into in parks. So really good outlook there. Wireless, you’ve mentioned there’s a lot of different things you could consider, but we’ve got the tools in house to go accelerate this business.

So that’s exactly what we’re focused on now. Broadband, we’re in the process of a pretty big pivot, but that’s really going to help stabilize and ultimately grow the base. Streaming is a category where you could easily bring this up. I think in streaming, we see a lot of logic for partnerships and bundles. There may be circumstances where full on consolidation consolidation makes sense, but really it’s the first two categories we’ve been focused on.

You’ve seen us take some steps there. And the importance related to that is just make sure you’ve got the strongest hand possible going into that, which is why to your question before between NBA, NFL, you know, college football, Premier League, you know, parts of NASCAR, Super Bowl, World, you know, World Cup next summer with with Telemundo, Olympics. It’s an incredibly strong hand to have along with a top two movie studio that’s feeding box office hits into pay one window, which the first place it goes is Peacock, and then incredible success we’ve had in reality programming, particularly more recently. So that’s strengthening the hand of Peacock into any sort of potential partnership or bundling opportunity you could talk about, which is really where we’re focused.

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: Maybe one last one. Just maybe an update on how you’re thinking about returning capital to shareholders.

Jason Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer, Comcast: Yes. I think we’ve had a very strong history and trajectory here. Since looking at this yesterday, since 2021, we’ve returned $62,000,000,000 back to shareholders. So it’s a staggering amount in particular relative to our current market cap, and it’s almost half of our current market cap. So we’ve been no stranger in this category.

I would look for more of the same. Our priorities always have been we were asked this question in the last call, hey, you got a favorable bill that’s going to help you with cash taxes. That’s true, about $1,000,000,000 an incremental benefit over on average in the next five years. And that gets plugged into our traditional capital allocation formula, which is number one, reinvest in the business and really reinvest in these six businesses for growth. And we’ve laid out exactly what we think the pipeline is there.

Number two, it’s continue to fortify the balance sheet and make sure the balance sheet is as strong as possible. And number three is returns back to shareholders, which we’ve got a really healthy trajectory historically. And there’s nothing I would point you to that would say there’s anything different in the coming quarters and years ahead. We’ll continue to return a lot

Mike Rollins, Communication Services and Infrastructure Coverage, Citi: of capital to shareholders. Jason, thanks so much for joining us today. Mike, thanks for having me. Thank you. Thanks.

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