Comcast has good 4th quarter, boosts dividend

Comcast Corp. CEO Brian Roberts told analysts Tuesday that he hopes federal regulators will give their full attention to the company's proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable Inc. after Thursday's scheduled FCC vote on net neutrality.

Roberts declined to be more specific on the merger review, though he said the Federal Communications Commission had an informal deadline of finishing its review of Comcast/Time Warner Cable by the end of March.

The Justice Department also is reviewing the megadeal, which has run into stiff opposition from Dish Network, Netflix, and advocacy groups, and seems bogged down in Washington.

At its meeting Thursday, the FCC could approve stronger regulations for the Internet - new rules that could be outmoded, Roberts said, because they are based on decades-old federal laws. But, he added, "until we see the fine print, we have to reserve judgment."

Roberts' comments came during a morning conference call with Wall Street analysts discussing Comcast's fourth-quarter and full-year 2014 earnings, which showed that both the exhaustive merger review and the national net neutrality debate had not been distractions.

The Philadelphia-based media giant reported a 4.8 percent gain in fourth-quarter revenue, with solid performances in the cable division and its NBC broadcast-television network. Universal theme parks in California and Florida, fueled by new attractions, had a stellar fourth quarter, with revenue growing 30 percent, to $735 million.

Comcast's NBCUniversal division is struggling with weak viewership at its cable networks, an industrywide problem because of a fragmenting TV audience, time-shifted viewing, and a burgeoning number of shows to watch.

The cable division added 6,000 TV subscribers in the fourth quarter compared with a gain of 46,000 in the year-ago period. Comcast officials called the year-over-year comparison difficult because of a popular double-play package the company heavily marketed in late 2013 that boosted TV additions.

For the year, Comcast shed 194,000 TV subscribers compared with a loss of 267,000 TV subscribers in 2013.

Comcast added 375,000 new high-speed Internet customers in 2014's fourth quarter, nearly matching its additions of 379,000 in the year-ago period.

Through 2014, Comcast enrolled 1.3 million new Internet subscribers, the ninth year in a row it had added more than one million.

Internet-related revenue rose 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter compared with a 1.1 percent boost in TV-related revenue, reflecting how Comcast's growth prospects have shifted to the Internet from television.

For all of 2014, Comcast's revenue neared $70 billion and profits topped $8 billion. Shares jumped almost 2 percent by noon Tuesday to a near-52-week high as the company disclosed it would boost its stock dividend by 11 percent, to $1 a share a year, and repurchase billions of dollars in stock in 2015.

Comcast expects to add to those billions of share repurchases if it completes the deal for Time Warner Cable and related transactions with Charter Communications, company officials said Tuesday.

Shares closed at $59.17 Tuesday, up $0.96 or 1.65 percent.

Roberts, chief financial officer Michael Angelakis, and cable division head Neil Smit said that improving the company's low-rated customer service would be a priority in 2015. Comcast has been rocked by customers' complaints over outages and profane name changes on customers' bills.

The customer experience should be Comcast's "best product," Roberts said. "We have not always lived up to that."

Analysts focused questions on Comcast's plan for its WiFi network, which has grown to 8.3 million wireless hot spots. New York cable provider Cablevision and Internet search giant Google have announced plans for a WiFi-based phone service.

Comcast officials said they are working on a WiFi plan and could have something to announce this year.