By Paul Thomasch
NEW YORK (Reuters) - COMCAST (CMCSA.NQ)Corp
Comcast's upbeat results -- its subscriber growth was also ahead of most expectations -- came during a quarter in which the company plowed resources into finishing its deal to acquire NBC Universal. The deal closed in late January, adding a broadcast network, cable networks like MSNBC and USA, theme parks and a movie studio to Comcast's lineup.
Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, also increased its annual dividend by 19 percent and accelerated a $2.1 billion stock repurchase program. That combination, along with the bullish quarterly earnings, lifted shares of the company by 4.6 percent in early trade.
Earnings for the quarter rose to $1.02 billion, or 36 cents a share, from $955 million, or 33 cents a share, in the period a year ago. Excluding one-time items, Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S estimates that Comcast earned 34 cents a share, ahead of the 32 cents a share analysts had expected.
Comcast's fourth-quarter revenue also surpassed expectations, rising 7 percent to $9.7 billion, it said on Wednesday.
The increase in revenue came thanks to a surge in advertising at its cable networks. But it also reflects Comcast's concentration on upgrading customers to more expensive combinations of services, such as broadband and cable. Average revenue it earned for each video customer rose by 10.6 percent in the quarter.
That helped soften the blow of losing 135,000 basic video customers, those who pay for only the least expensive cable service. A tough economy plus intense competition from satellite and telecommunication company rivals, such as DirecTV
Still, this quarter's loss of basic video customers is far less than the 199,000 from a year before, suggesting the lower end of the cable business may be stabilizing.
More affluent customers, meanwhile, kept adding high-end services to their subscriptions. In the quarter, Comcast added 292,000 high-speed Internet customers, up 18 percent from a year before, and 257,000 voice customers, up about 6 percent.
(Reporting by Paul Thomasch, editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Dave Zimmerman)
