Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) 2019 Deutsche Bank Investor Conference Call March 12, 2019 9:40 AM ET
Company Participants
David Watson - Senior Executive Vice President of Comcast and President and CEO of Comcast Cable
Conference Call Participants
Bryan Kraft - Deutsche Bank
Bryan Kraft
Okay, alright. Thanks everyone for joining us for our final morning keynote. Really pleased to introduce Dave Watson. Dave is the Senior Executive Vice President of Comcast and President and CEO of Comcast Cable. So welcome Dave.
David Watson
Good to be here.
Bryan Kraft
Why don't we just start off with maybe a high level question? There's been a lot of changes happening across the cable, media and internet landscape. How do you position Comcast Cable for long-term success in this rapidly changing environment?
David Watson
Well, I think Bryan, one of the keys that have helped us is consistency thing focused around just really handful of things, three things that we've been very focused on over the years. First and foremost, to whatever category that we're participating in, we want to deliver the best experience so we want to be a market leader and the major categories where we compete delivering the best experience that we can. Then connected to that is number two, is just constant improvement. I think for those that follow us see this that every one of the categories, the products and services on an ongoing basis, pretty much every year that we are improving things.
Broadband is a great example of that. Broadband, 17 years in a row, we've increased speeds, we kept at it to the point where 10 years ago something like 15 megabits broadband capability, now we're up to nearly all of our footprint is one gig, so just constantly keeping at it. We've rolled out xFi that has a dimension of Wi-Fi in the home that improves coverage and control capability. And then video, video I think folks know about X1, but X1 is another service where we just continuously improve the capability we've added last year. Amazon on top of Netflix, YouTube and connected it in such a way that I think is very unique, very different that I haven't seen anybody else do it the way that we're doing it, contributed towards 9 billion voice commands last year and people are getting to what they want.
So the third component is just deepening the consumer relationship, broadband is the center piece, which we then partner video with that, but we also now have mobile and other capabilities home security and when you add those things up in packages that consumers' value, it just extends the consumer life, improves customer lifetime value and so it has led towards I think a pretty good level of performance. Last year, we added one million customer relationships, 13th year in a row, did over one million broadband net customer additions, we had I think fairly solid financial performance, but it did for a full year of 6.5 EBITDA growth, the best in seven years.
And then because of broadband because of the focus on the expense side, then margin improvement, we just had taken to two business services and consumer businesses, the growth of nearly 10% between the connectivity side and if you look at our free cash flow growth of 13%, so all these things so to add up or improving the consumer experience, we're competing aggressively with the products that we have and we like the trajectory and I think that this formula will serve as well going forward.
