Time Warner Wants to Pick Up Phone

Time Warner reported third quarter earnings today, with revenue up 15% in the systems it held before its Adelphia-triggered system acquisitions and swaps. “Time Warner Cable is generating outstanding results, even as it successfully integrates its new systems from Adelphia and Comcast,” chairman and CEO Dick Parsons told investors on today’s earnings call. “The triple play bundle continues to drive revenues up and churn down, and the addition to our footprint of what amounts to virgin territory for phone promises to accelerate our growth going forward.” Here’s more from today’s call to analysts:

Dick Parsons, chairman and CEO:

"Our historical Time Warner Cable systems performed extremely well across all key segments. Most notably, revenue in historical systems grew 15%. Also, in historical systems our basic, digital and high-speed data subscriber net additions were all up compared to a year ago. In fact, high-speed data net additions were in excess of 200,000 for the fifth quarter in a row, and digital phone continued to make strong gains in penetration, now at 11% of all eligible homes. …

We are focused sharply on successfully integrating our newly acquired systems. So far, this process is going very well, and we are on plan. After only a couple of months, Time Warner Cable has already begun the infrastructure upgrades.

Looking out into the next year, our priorities at Time Warner Cable, beyond integrating our new systems, start with continuing to drive the triple play bundle. Triple play penetration reached 9% of all customers in the third quarter. While we’re pleased so far, there is significant opportunity to improve on this success, particularly when you consider that we have yet to introduce phone into the old Adelphia systems.

Time Warner Cable will continue to innovate for future growth, including further developing an interactive video advertising business and beginning to roll out commercial voice and scale."

Jeff Bewkes, president and COO:

"We are very happy with our success in phone so far over the last year or more, and we’re ahead of the industry with 11% of eligible homes on VoIP. But of course, the next 10 points of penetration above 11% that we are at now are harder than the first 10 or 11 points…

We have also seen some more aggressive marketing activity from the telcos, particularly in our case in the Carolinas. That was expected, and we are at this point lifting our performance there as well. So you definitely ask yourself, have we hit a ceiling? No, it is very clear to us that we haven’t.

We have got several systems already over 20%: Albany, Syracuse, Binghamton, all heading towards 25%. With offerings like the $99 triple play bundle, which we introduced in every division in September, we don’t see why we can’t get there and keep moving up across our footprint. … We have not yet put it into our Adelphia and Comcast systems, or mostly our Adelphia systems. We have really high hopes for pretty rapid progress there as we integrate those."

Find out more:

• Time Warner’s Q3 press release

• Time Warner’s Q3 earnings call: full transcript (courtesy of Seeking Alpha)