The companies on the Global 500 employ 70.2 million people, and their revenue represents more than one-third of the world’s GDP.

Fortune Global 500

With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.5 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $24 billion.

America's Most Innovative Companies

The corporations on our annual list of the world's 500 largest companies combined to generate $41.7 trillion in revenue over the past year.

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.6 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $22 billion.

The corporations on our annual list posted aggregate revenues of $41 trillion for the second year in a row.

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The 200 companies on this list are transforming industries from the inside out.

The corporations on our annual list of the world’s largest companies delivered a record $41 trillion in aggregate revenues.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

F500-2023-079-Charter Communications

Despite dropping 10 spots on the list, Charter Communications had a strong year with a 4.5% increase in revenues for a total of $54 billion in 2022. The telecommunications provider also saw a change in leadership with former chief operating officer Chris Winfrey taking the role of CEO from retiring predecessor Tom Rutledge (who will remain as executive chairman). 
<ul> 
 	<li>In spring 2022, Charter announced a joint venture with Comcast, its biggest competitor in the cable TV market, for a streaming platform to compete with the likes of Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV.</li> 
 	<li>Charter spent $1.8 billion to expand broadband access in rural areas, part of efforts to bring more Americans online (and counter the ongoing decline in cable subscriptions).</li> 
 	<li>Charter launched its first suite of programmatic ad products to keep pace with digital ad sales in the streaming market; its advertising business grew 18.1% in 2022.</li> 
</ul>

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

F500-2022-069-Charter Communications

Charter Communications, the Stamford, Conn.–based telecommunications giant, dropped five spots on this year’s list. Though it added 1.2 million new internet customers over the course of the year, the company continued to see declines in residential video customers, losing 71,000 in the last quarter of 2021 alone. Still, its revenue increased 7.5% to $51.7 billion, and its profits increased a more dramatic 44.5% to $4.7 billion. In February 2022, the company announced a new $20 standard minimum wage in the face of a continued tight labor market.

Total revenue for the world’s biggest companies fell 4.8% to $31.7 trillion this year—the first decline in half a decade.

G500-2021-230-Charter Communications

<span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;The Connecticut-based telecom giant added a record 2.2 million new Internet customers in its most recent fiscal year. That helped the company bring in $48 billion in revenue, a 5% increase from the year before. Net income also grew significantly—an impressive 93% jump year over year. But the number of video subscribers barely budged. That wasn’t a big surprise, given the continuing cord-cutting trend and the plethora of nontraditional options viewers now have for consuming content. Charter’s average monthly revenue from residential customers was also challenged, dipping slightly from $112.63 per month in 2019 to $111.15 in 2020.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:14723,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:16777215},&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;14&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:0},&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Calibri&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:11}">The Connecticut-based telecom giant added a record 2.2 million new Internet customers in its most recent fiscal year. That helped the company bring in $48 billion in revenue, a 5% increase from the year before. Net income also grew significantly—an impressive 93% jump year over year. But the number of video subscribers barely budged. That wasn’t a big surprise, given the continuing cord-cutting trend and the plethora of nontraditional options viewers now have for consuming content. Charter’s average monthly revenue from residential customers was also challenged, dipping slightly from $112.63 per month in 2019 to $111.15 in 2020.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-64-Charter Communications

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $33.3 trillion in revenues and $2.1 trillion in profits.

G500-Featured Image-Logo-2020

Cord-cutting is not a new phenomenon for Charter, which has to contend not only with its traditional competitors but also with new, online-only entrants. Still, despite further declines in its video and voice subscriptions, the Connecticut-based telecom giant managed to add more than 1.4 million new Internet customers in its last fiscal year. It also successfully squeezed slightly more monthly revenue from residential customers, an average of $112.60 per month in 2019, up from $111.60 the year before. This growth helped the company boost its revenue to $45.8 billion, which was up nearly 5% year-over-year.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-071-Charter-Communications

Cord-cutting is not a new phenomenon for Charter, which has to contend not only with its traditional competitors, but also with new, online-only entrants. Still, despite more declines in its video and voice subscriptions, the Connecticut-based telecom giant managed to add more than 1.4 million new Internet customers in its last fiscal year. It also successfully squeezed slightly more monthly revenue from residential customers, an average of $112.60 per month in 2019, up from $111.60 the year before. This growth helped the company boost its revenue to $45.8 billion, which was up nearly 5% year-over-year.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.7 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

Welcome to the inaugural Fortune Future 50, our new ranking of companies best positioned for breakout growth.

The Future 50

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

Future 50

Overall Score

Sector

Industry

Website

Employees

HQ Location

Revenues ($M) (Past 12 Months)

Profits ($M) (Past 12 Months)

Market Value as of Oct. 9, 2019 ($M)

Strongest Dimension

Years on list

Previous rank

State

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

Revenues ($M)

Profits ($M)

Assets ($M)

Total Stockholder Equity ($M)

Profit Ratios

Profit as % of Revenues

Profits as % of Assets

Profits as % of Stockholder Equity

Earnings Per Share (last Fiscal Year)

Earnings Per Share ($)

EPS % Change (from prior fiscal year)

EPS % Change (5 year annual rate)

EPS % Change (10 year annual rate)

Total Return

Total Return to Investors (last year)

Total Return to Investors (5 year, annualized)

Total Return to Investors (10 year, annualized)

Charter Communications, founded in 1993, offers cable and broadband services via its Spectrum brand to more than 31 million U.S. customers across 41 states. Spectrum Mobile, the company’s offering for phone-based services, launched its 5G network in 2020. In May 2025, Charter announced a deal to buy cable and broadband provider Cox Communications for $34.5 billion.

Q2 2026

Q1 2026

Q4 2025

Q3 2025

Q2 2025

Q1 2025

Q4 2024

Charter Communications (CHTR): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

Charter Communications

charter communications

Hello, and welcome to Charter Communications' first quarter 2026 investor conference call. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of the formal remarks, at which time you will be given instructions for the question-and-answer session. Also, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to Stefan Anninger.

Thanks, operator, and welcome everyone. The presentation that accompanies this call can be found on our website, ir.charter.com. I would like to remind you that there are a number of risk factors and other cautionary statements contained in our SEC filings, and we encourage you to read them carefully. Various remarks that we make on this call concerning expectations, predictions, plans, and prospects constitute forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from historical or anticipated results.

Any forward-looking statements reflect management's current view only, and Charter undertakes no obligation to revise or update such statements. As a reminder, all growth rates noted on this call and in the presentation are calculated on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise specified. On today's call, we have Chris Winfrey, our President and CEO, and Jessica Fischer, our CFO. With that, let's turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks, Stefan. During the first quarter, Spectrum Mobile remained the fastest growing mobile provider in our footprint, and we now have over 12 million mobile lines, including an increase of 370,000 Spectrum Mobile lines in the quarter. That's 1.8 million new lines over the last 12 months for growth over 17%. We're pleased with that growth given the continued intensity of mobile subsidies from the three big telcos. In addition, our video customer losses continued to improve year-over-year.

A 60,000 loss was less than a 1/3 of last year's first quarter loss, driven by significant product improvements over the past couple of years. In Internet, competition for new customers remains high, and our first quarter Internet customer loss totaled 120,000. Revenue was down 1% year-over-year, primarily driven by lower residential video revenue, while residential connectivity revenue grew 0.9% year-over-year. First quarter EBITDA, excluding transition expenses for the Cox transaction, declined by 1.8%, primarily due to a prior year benefit.

Cable industry Internet growth has been pressured for several years now, given new competition, a challenging housing environment, and other factors like mobile substitution. We remain confident about our ability to win in the marketplace and grow over the longer term.

Ultimately, that confidence and our future success is founded on three building blocks: our powerful advanced network, our core operating strategy around products and pricing, and our focus on improving customer satisfaction. Starting with customer satisfaction, our customers remain the central focus when we make decisions for any product or service and how we allocate our resources. We have an integrated and detailed approach that starts at the highest levels of the organization. Our customer focus is not just cultural, it's also core to our incentives. Beyond the obvious share price incentives, NPS scores and other service-related metrics now drive a meaningful part of our overall annual incentive structure.

Relentless improvement is also a key component of our approach, and that applies to our network capability and reliability, products that we offer, and to our service. We're constantly working to improve each of these, with examples including new product innovations like our Invincible WiFi and our Anytime Upgrade feature for Mobile, and the dramatic decline we've seen in service and trouble calls per customer. We've also deployed new AI tools now used by our service agents, driving higher customer satisfaction and reducing call times with higher job satisfaction for our employees as well.

We have a seasoned, very competitive team here at Charter, fully aligned with our shareholders, and that team will only get better with the addition of top-flight talent from the Cox team and Nick Jeffery, who will join in September. Moving to our Advanced network, our high-capacity network is an unrivaled asset. It offers gigabit speeds and low latency everywhere we operate.

Those capabilities matter long term as customer data usage continues to increase, including in the upstream, where we're seeing 20% annual growth driven by things like self-driving cars, a significant and increasing upload. By the end of this year, about 50% of the current Spectrum network will be upgraded to symmetrical and multi-gig service, with significant work on the remaining 50% already in play.

By deploying remote OLTs and LoRaWAN transponders, we will have fiber on-demand capabilities and fully-active telemetry in the vast majority of our footprint, giving us cost and service advantages. Our network is both wired and wireless in 100% of our footprint. You can get mobile from us wherever we offer our gigabit speeds and vice versa. With our expanding hybrid MNO capabilities using CBRS and Wi-Fi in conjunction with the Verizon mobile network, we are driving our seamless connectivity advantage. That is the basis for Spectrum Mobile's fastest overall mobile speeds.

In addition, our network is both fiber-based and powered to its edge, which means it can uniquely provide enhanced wireless opportunities that we haven't pursued yet. If you think about our ubiquitous deployment of multi-gig, unique seamless connectivity capabilities with low latency, edge compute, and the potential for fiber power DAS, nobody has the set of assets that we do.

You see us demonstrating those capabilities with early deployments of immersive content with Spectrum Front Row, authenticated offload for AWS, and likely extending that to increasingly autonomous vehicles. We're also deploying other B2B products with Edge Cache and GPU as a service. Our network and data assets really lend themselves to future B2B and B2C applications, which require proximity and low latency under 10 ms, which we now provide.Our industry has always excelled at finding new products and customers for our key assets.

Our core operating strategy remains unchanged, offering great products at the best value with continuously improving service. That service is uniquely delivered by our 100% U.S.-based employees, 24/7, with a customer commitment supported by money-back guarantees. That core operating strategy has served us well. It fueled our organic and inorganic growth from Legacy Charter in 2013, with just 5 million customer relationships, to Charter today, with nearly 32 million customers.

Now pro forma for the Cox transaction, with over 70 million passings. We take the responsibility that we have to our local communities personally, and it's reflected in our operating strategy. With those three building blocks in place, I want to turn to what we're doing day to day right now to win in an increasingly converged market. Our competitors are all talking convergence, but we uniquely provide it now and in the future. Slide five of today's presentation clearly shows that we offer more for less than our competitors.

Our results don't yet reflect that reality, given the legacy reputation of cable, so we remain focused on clearly messaging and delivering our superior value, utility, and service to both new and existing customers, and we're doing that in different ways. We launched our $1,000 savings guarantee in February, which demonstrates the value we deliver in a very clear way. If you sign up for Spectrum Internet and switch two or more mobile lines from Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, we guarantee $1,000 of savings in your first year, or we'll cover the difference.

We also recently launched a new digital buy flow for our online channel. It better demonstrates our bundle value and savings versus competitors, and the new buy flow is achieving better yield. We're also actively migrating our existing basic customers to our newer pricing and packaging, giving them more product, including Internet speed increases and mobile, for the same price or slightly more than they're paying, so they get more value, creating higher satisfaction and reducing their propensity to churn.

Roughly 45% of our residential customers are now in the pricing and packaging launched in late 2024. With respect to providing superior utility, over 50% of our expanded basic video customers have activated at least one of our included streaming apps, with those activating taking nearly four streaming apps on average. Customer churn for expanded basic customers who activate is 1/3 lower, and it is meaningfully lower across all customer tenure.

Keep in mind that nearly all video customers are also broadband customers, so that's a big help. We also launched our new Invincible WiFi router in February, which effectively guarantees connectivity. When a home or business loses power, Invincible WiFi's battery unit keeps the router running. It also comes with a backup 5G cellular connection, keeping customers online without interruption if a network disruption occurs.

The upgrade and attach rate was much higher than expected, and we've had to prioritize our supply to a smaller audience until we get the right level of supply. It's a little frustrating short term, but Invincible WiFi is a great way to add utility to our service, which improves quality, lowers churn, and earns more revenue. It's a great example of an innovation that provides better utility to our customers. In Mobile, we have the most value-rich plans in our footprint, a market-leading anytime upgrade program, the most valuable repair and insurance plans, and the best international service plans around.

In Service, I'll simply highlight what we've talked about previously, our continuous service improvements through telemetry improvements with our network upgrades, the use of AI in the network and frontline employee tools, same-day service and installation guarantees, often we're at your doorstep in an hour, and a commitment to a U.S.-based service agent. We are America's connectivity company.

Before I turn things over to Jessica, I just wanted to provide a brief update on where we are with the Cox transaction. We've now received all the necessary federal and state approvals that we need to close, except from California, and we're working with the California Public Utilities Commission towards a summer close. Within a couple of months of closing, we will launch the Spectrum brand and our pricing and packaging within the Legacy Cox footprint.

Our focus, as always, will be on product penetration and customer ARPU, not single product ARPU, and of course, growing free cash flow per passing. Cox's low mobile and video penetration rates are major opportunities, and that's what's going to assist us in migrating the customer base to our pricing and packaging in an efficient manner. That's something we've done successfully several times before, including with Time Warner Cable, Bright House, and Bresnan, NetCharter in both 2013 and the last 18 months, really.

In addition to benefiting from better mobile and video products, the Cox communities will benefit from lower promotional and retail pricing, sales channel expansion, including field sales and stores, and our very complementary B2B capabilities, which will help accelerate the growth of both Cox and Spectrum Business. As part of the acquisition, we're picking up talent, which we expected, and unexpected capabilities in B2B and network AI.

We're stepping into a very high-quality network asset. The Cox network has been very well-maintained with robust investment through the years. Cox's mid-split process is nearly complete, and it gives us plenty of competitive runway to implement high-split and DOCSIS 4.0 after we finish those projects within the current Spectrum footprint. We can then make that move at lower cost and at faster speed. That's what was included in our original plan, although we don't have to rush it.

We're looking forward to the completion of our multi-year investment programs, the near-term actions to win in our current footprint, and the pending Cox closing and driving growth in that footprint. With that, now I'll pass it over to Jessica.

Thanks, Chris. Please note that any forward-looking financial or customer information that we provide in today's discussion or presentation does not include Cox or any transition costs related to Cox integration planning. Let's please turn to our customer results on slide eight. Including residential and small business, we lost 120,000 Internet customers in the first quarter, driven by lower connects year-over-year, partly offset by slightly lower churn.

The operating environment for new sales, in particular Internet, continues to be competitive. We continue to see expanded fixed wireless competition and higher mobile substitution, as well as ongoing fiber overlap growth at a rate similar to prior quarters. Though I would point out that we also continue to have higher market share than our competitors, even in mature fiber markets. Collectively, that drove first quarter Internet sales lower year-over-year.

Churn improved year-over-year, and Internet churn, including non-pay churn, remains at very low levels. In Mobile, we added 368,000 lines, with higher gross additions year-over-year, more than offset by higher disconnects. Net adds in the quarter were lower due to heavy device subsidy activity by the big telco competitors, including the iPhone 17.

Video customers declined by 60,000 versus a loss of 181,000 in 1Q 2025, with the improvement primarily driven by much lower video downgrades and customer churn year-over-year, resulting from the new pricing and packaging we launched in late 2024, Xumo, and the seamless entertainment product improvements, including our programmer streaming app inclusion packaging. New connects and upgrades to our fully featured video package with apps were up year-over-year.

Wireline voice customers declined by 174,000, with the year-over-year improvement primarily driven by lower churn. In rural, we continue to see strong customer relationship growth, generating 41,000 net customer additions in our subsidized rural footprint in the quarter. Subsidized rural passings grew by 89,000 in the first quarter, and by over 483,000 over the last 12 months, which is in addition to our continued non-rural construction and fill-in activity. Moving to first quarter revenue results on slide nine.

Over the last year, residential customers declined by 1.5%, while residential revenue per customer relationship declined by 1.4% year-over-year, given the growth of lower priced video packages within our base, $218 million of costs allocated to programmer streaming apps and netted within video revenue, versus $47 million in the prior year period, and a decline in video customers during the last year. Those factors were partly offset by promotional rate step-ups, rate adjustments, and the growth of Spectrum Mobile lines. Excluding the programmer streaming app allocation headwinds to residential revenue, residential revenue per customer relationship grew by 0.3% year-over-year.

As slide nine shows, in total, residential revenue declined by 2.7%, and it was down by 1.1% when excluding costs allocated to streaming apps and netted within video revenue in both periods. Turning to commercial, total commercial revenue grew by 1% year-over-year, with mid-market and large business revenue growth of 2.1%. When excluding all wholesale revenue, mid-market and large business revenue grew by 2.8%.

Small business revenue grew by 0.2%, reflecting year-over-year growth in revenue per small business customer of 0.9%, mostly offset by a year-over-year decline in small business customers of 0.7%. First quarter advertising revenue grew by 5.3% given higher political revenue year-over-year. Excluding political, advertising revenue declined 3.4% year-over-year. Other revenue grew by 14.2%, driven by higher mobile device sales. In total, consolidated first quarter revenue was down 1% year-over-year, but increased 0.1% when excluding advertising revenue and programmer app allocation.

Moving to operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA on slide 10. In the first quarter, total operating expenses decreased by 0.2% year-over-year. Programming costs declined by 9.3% due to $218 million of costs allocated to programmer streaming apps and netted within video revenue, versus $47 million in the prior period, a higher mix of lighter video packages and a 1.3% decline in video customers year-over-year, which was partly offset by higher programming rates. Other costs of revenue increased by 11.4%, primarily driven by mobile service direct costs, higher mobile device sales, and higher advertising sales costs given higher political revenue.

Cost to service customers, which combines field and technology operations and customer operations, decreased 1.4% year-over-year, primarily due to lower labor costs. Marketing and residential sales expense declined by 3.2% year-over-year due to lower marketing expenses and labor expense. Transition expenses relating to the pending Cox transaction totaled $24 million in the quarter.

Finally, other expense grew by 5.3%, primarily driven by one-time benefits of $75 million in 1Q 2025. Adjusted EBITDA declined by 2.2% year-over-year in the quarter and declined by 1.8% when excluding transition expenses.

Turning to net income, we generated a bit under $1.2 billion of net income attributable to Charter shareholders in the first quarter, compared to a bit over $1.2 billion in the prior year period, primarily driven by lower adjusted EBITDA year-over-year, partly offset by lower other operating expense given our non-cash LA Lakers RSN balance sheet write-down in the prior year.

Turning to slide 11. First quarter capital expenditures totaled $2.9 billion, $456 million higher than last year's first quarter, driven by timing of spend with higher network evolution spend, which lands in upgrade rebuild spend, and higher CPE driven by new Wi-Fi 7 routers and our new Invincible WiFi unit. We continue to expect total 2026 capital expenditures to reach approximately $11.4 billion. Looking beyond 2026, we expect total capital spending in dollar terms to be on a meaningful downward trajectory.

After our evolution and expansion capital initiatives conclude, our run rate capital expenditures should be below $8 billion per year. Just to highlight, that reduction in capital expenditures on its own from approximately $11.7 billion in 2025 to less than $8 billion in 2028, is equivalent to over $28 of free cash flow per share based on today's share count. If we take consensus 2026 free cash flow and substitute our expected 2028 CapEx for 2026 CapEx, our current stock price would imply a free cash flow multiple of only about 3.8x and a free cash flow yield of over 25%.

Turning to first quarter free cash flow on slide 12. First quarter free cash totaled $1.4 billion, about $200 million lower than last year given accelerated timing of capital expenditures in the year, lower EBITDA, and higher cash paid for interest year-over-year, partly offset by a less unfavorable change in cable working capital.

Turning to cash taxes. First quarter cash taxes totaled $64 million. We continue to expect that our calendar year 2026 cash tax payments will total between $500 million-$800 million. We finished the first quarter with $94 billion in debt principal. Our weighted average cost of debt remains at an attractive 5.2%, and our current run rate annualized cash interest is $4.9 billion. During the quarter, we repurchased 4.3 million Charter shares, totaling $963 million at an average price of $225 per share.

As of the end of the first quarter, our ratio of net debt to last 12-month adjusted EBITDA remained at 4.15x and stood at 4.22x pro forma for the pending Liberty Broadband transaction. During the pendency of the Cox deal, we plan to be at or slightly under 4.25x leverage pro forma for the Liberty transaction. Following the close of those transactions, we will target the low end of the 3.5x-3.75x range, which we expect to achieve within three years following close. Even with this delevering, we continue to expect significant ongoing capital returns to shareholders.

Before turning the call over to Q&A, I want to make a few comments regarding our pending Cox transaction. We now estimate transaction synergies or run rate operating expense synergies of at least $800 million and are likely to grow that further. Those estimates do not include the benefits of applying Charter's operating strategy to create revenue and operating cost synergies over time or CapEx savings. We believe those operating synergies will also be significant.

Turning to our reporting plans, I wanted to give you a brief preview on how we expect to report and to mention a few things to better navigate our post-close results. Our first post-close results will reflect a full quarter for Legacy Charter, plus a stub period for Legacy Cox. Year-over-year, actual comparisons won't be helpful, but we intend to present Charter's quarterly trending schedule with pro forma data along the lines of what you received today. Going forward, we will report similar customer PSU and revenue data for both legacy entities for several quarters following close, both separately and on a consolidated basis.

This approach will allow you to track the development of both Legacy Charter and Legacy Cox. We will not show expenses or capital expenditures by legacy entity. That's not really practical given the shared nature of key large items like programming, overhead, and significant centralized capital spend. We will also continue to report transition expense and capital related to the integration and will provide updates on certain items, including estimates for the synergies we have realized, so that you can better isolate the organic growth of the business.

At close, our outstanding share count will increase as we will issue the equivalent of just over 46 million Charter shares to Cox Enterprises, comprised of common and preferred partnership units, partly offset by net Charter share reduction of about 6.8 million shares associated with the Liberty Broadband transaction.

That 6.8 million figure is lower now than when we announced the Liberty Broadband transaction, primarily due to our ongoing share repurchases from Liberty Broadband. If we had closed on March 31st, our stand-alone share count at close on an as converted, as exchanged basis would have been about 179 million. We will provide additional post-close reporting updates as we get closer to close. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the Raise Hand button, which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn, you will receive a message on your screen from the host allowing you to talk, and then you will hear your name called. Please accept, unmute your audio, and ask your question. As a reminder, we are allowing analysts to ask one question today. We will wait one moment to allow the queue to form. Our first question will come from Sean Diffley with Morgan Stanley. You may now unmute and ask your question.

Great. Thanks very much, team. Can you hear me?

Hey, guys. Clearly the focus is on getting the Cox deal done, and thank you for the updates on synergies and timing with California PUC. I was curious your assessment on the potential for further cable M&A from a regulatory standpoint. Obviously, the FCC, when reviewing the Cox deal, mentioned increasing competition from the likes of fixed wireless and satellite. I'm curious how you're framing your ability and willingness to do more meaningful consolidation from here in the cable sector.

Sure. Look, first and foremost, make it clear, I'm not commenting on any particular company or assets. I think as everybody knows, we like cable as an investment. I think it's a great business. We'd like to acquire more cable assets if it can be done at an appropriate price, conditions, and the size of the transaction depends on. We'll drive higher synergies. When you hear Jessica talked about the synergies inside of Cox, you can kind of flex that up and down based on the size.

I think when you step back and take a look at the environment from a regulatory perspective, and each deal is unique and you have to approach it in its own way, but at the end, we're just regional competitors with other cable companies. Each of the cable companies is a regional competitor. We don't have overlap, and all of us are competing against national and global competitors. That's never been the case more than it is today.

When you think about fiber overbuild, when you think about national telcos with both wireless mobile, wireless fixed, wireless access, fiber overbuilt themselves in many cases. If we think about the video space, which is really global competition, and each element of the space that we operate in, it's much more competitive than it was five or certainly 10 years ago.

I think the Charter operating strategy, when you think about the benefits that we provide in transactions like Cox or we did with Time Warner Cable, Bright House, the operating strategy, it's been good for customers and it's been good for employees, and we've demonstrated that. It's not just something that we say at the time of an acquisition.

It's actually been delivered 100% US-based, lower pricing for retail and promotional pricing, and we've been innovative with new products. We've used that scale to improve the quality of the service and the products. It's helped us to be a better competitor and a better service provider against national and global competitors, and I think there's a significant rationale. There's nothing that we're looking at today or doing today other than just finishing the Cox transaction. I think the opportunity is there to do more over time and we'll evaluate it when it's available.

Thanks, Sean. Operator, we'll take our next question.

Your next question will come from Craig Moffett with MoffettNathanson.

Let's stay with the Cox transaction for a second. Once you close, you're now running in your own standalone business, about flat year-over-year broadband ARPU. There's been a lot made of the fact that Cox's broadband prices and therefore its broadband ARPU is significantly higher than yours. How do you think about the trajectory of how quickly you can move those customers onto Spectrum pricing? What does that look like as you give those generally more attractive offers to Cox customers?

Sure. Look, you're right, the broadband ARPU is higher than ours. You can see that. Also the customer ARPU is actually not that different. I think that's the place to focus on, is what's the customer ARPU going to do over time and the margin at a household level. Clearly the broadband standalone pricing, which is part of the rationale for getting the deal done, is going to be lower both at promotional and retail, and the broadband reported ARPU for Cox is going to go down.

Our goal is to use video and mobile, given the super low penetration that exists of those products at Cox, to make sure that the customer ARPU is intact and could potentially, likely increase over time and to drive margin in there. As a result, what you'll end up with is a financial profile and a trajectory that's being preserved based on providing more value into the household. The churn rate at Cox is higher than ours, so I think we have a real opportunity to drive benefits there. I think entering into the market, Craig. The Cox name is great.

Spectrum, I think, is a great name. It's not one over the other. It's that you will have a new name in the marketplace, in these markets with lower broadband pricing at retail and promotion, with a free mobile line for a year that doesn't exist today, with the fastest mobile product in the country, at the lowest price, really, for anything of that scale. A video product that is fully developed, meaning in the Spectrum footprint, we came out with Spectrum TV app.

It's improved over time. It didn't have pause live TV. It didn't have Cloud DVR at the beginning. All that exists today. It exists with seamless entertainment in a way that's now easy to activate, which wasn't the case before. In the Spectrum footprint, those products, including mobile and video, just continue to get better. Here we're going to enter into Cox footprint with a big bang.

New name, a great way to save money, both at retail and promotion for broadband. Excellent mobile and video products that are fully developed and brand new in the marketplace. I think we're going to make a splash because we're new. Now, that doesn't go on forever. Your service reputation has to earn that. Is that a two-year tailwind where you're going to have much higher sales because you are new and because you're providing all this additional product and pricing and value? That'll be the case.

We're going to have field sales force that don't exist today. We're going to have service hours that don't exist today. We're going to develop the insourcing capabilities and U.S.-based workforce that can do same-day installs and same-day service in a way that doesn't exist today. We have the opportunity to earn a brand-new service reputation in that market and have long-term growth.

All of which, to go back to your question, means that you can have higher sales of broadband, you can have lower churn of broadband, you can have a significantly higher attach rate for mobile and video that preserves your overall customer ARPU and margin, and have more operating and CapEx cost synergies along the way that allow you to fund that growth. I think it's going to be a unique footprint, even relative to the standalone Charter that you're looking at today.

The pace of migration for the broadband base, similar to what we've done inside the Charter standalone footprint many times and what we did with Time Warner Cable and Bright House, you can pace the migration based on your marketing efforts to your existing customers, and how quickly do you put them into loyalty offers and see what's working, and in terms of additional product attached to offset some of the lower pricing that we're introducing into the market.

I feel really good about where we're going to go, and we're just waiting to be able to bring that type of benefit and those savings into not just California. California is about a fifth of the overall Cox customers, but we have 4/5 of the footprint that is patiently awaiting. We're excited to get going and bring those benefits to the California customers and to the customers across the rest of the country.

Yeah. I'd have one more just numerical item to that, Craig, as you're thinking about it. I mean, Chris said that the average revenue per customer is not that different from where we sit. The other kind of interesting thing is that the EBITDA margin is also not that different from where we sit today, even though broadband makes up a much larger portion of their revenue, than it does of ours, which might have lent itself to a different cost profile.

We have some space if we move the operating cost structure to look more like ours over time. In particular, as you move it that way, recognizing that it's a marginal additional business rather than an entire business that you have to fully replicate an overhead structure for. There's plenty of space to then create room for that change that you make in the revenue stream over time as well.

Yeah. I'm going a different direction. Everything that we just talked about really is on the residential side, but I mentioned it in the prepared remarks. I think one of the real pleasant surprises. We've had many pleasant surprises in evaluating the Cox assets and getting to know the team even better, but the B2B capabilities are entirely complementary. If you think about, Cox has a best-in-class hospitality capabilities.

They have the longest service reputation in B2B across the country for cable operators. They have product sets in some cases with rapid scale that we don't have, and the hope is that we can deploy that across our existing base. We have scale in Spectrum Business that can benefit the Cox footprint, but it also can apply the things that they do really well and apply that across a much broader footprint, even in hospitality.

If you think about what they do in Las Vegas and applying that across New York, L.A., Orlando, and Dallas, all of our major markets. I'm pretty excited, and we're going to have a big nucleus of the Cox team that's really helping and driving that part of the business to higher growth for both Spectrum Business and Cox as what exists today. Not our biggest portion of our overall revenue base, but I think it's going to be a big revenue contributor for both of the current operations.

Thanks, Craig. Operator, we'll take our next question.

Your next question will come from Vikash Harlalka with New Street Research.

Hi. Thanks so much for taking my question. I have a two-parter on pricing and ARPU. Chris, you were ahead of the curve on pricing strategy when we compare it with your peers, but do you think you've pulled all the levers on pricing strategy, or are there more pricing changes to come? As an example, like a five-year price lock that Comcast and Optimum have implemented. Then on ARPU, broadband ARPU was flattish in 1Q. Should we expect an acceleration from here? Thank you.

Sure. Look, we like our pricing and packaging strategy. It works. Clearly, we'd like to be having more sales on the front end, and so that has us really thinking through, are there other ways to go to market and get a better response rate from customers? We're constantly evaluating that. There's no pride if we see things that are working elsewhere, we'd be happy to adopt it. We spend time looking at it and thinking about it. When we've run some trials around five-year guarantees or five-year price locks, we try different things, we haven't seen the necessary lift ourselves, but maybe that's because we didn't do it at scale.

We also want to think about not just the promotional price, but what are the roll-off and what's the retail rates, and so it's an entire package of where you end up over time. All of which to say, we continue to evaluate and look at things. We're very focused on returning to broadband growth. Right now, we don't see any reason to change what we're doing and continue to focus on that. It doesn't mean that we're not trying things left and right to make sure that we can get a better response rate and consideration from new customers.

From an ARPU growth perspective across the year, I think that you heard Chris just say that one of the things that we do in the market constantly is to tune offers to make sure that we're driving the right sort of total customer lifetime value for the business, but also being cognizant of what happens then inside of the year with ARPU and EBITDA. As we do those things and look at pricing overall, there are a number of factors that can drive up or down there.

I think on ARPU growth for the year, that it'll be close either way in terms of whether we end up with net growth. As you noted, we're pretty flat in the first quarter. It'll depend on a number of factors and in how we sort of address the marketplace.

Operationally, just so you have a sense of how that works is, I talked earlier when Craig asked the question, the pace of your loyalty migrations for existing customer base, how aggressively leaning in. That has a high customer lifetime value impact. It can have a short-term broadband impact. The pace of proactive and reactive migration of your existing base and some of the, to a lesser extent, some of the offers that you try at the outset for new acquisition.

You have to trade off the customer lifetime value and the ROI of some of those efforts versus the short-term impact to ARPU and things that all of us like to see from an ARPU development. That's an active, I wouldn't say daily, but it's a monthly practice of just coming and taking a look at where we're at and making sure we're doing the right thing for the long term health of the business and for the customer relationship and at the same time, meeting our financial commitments along the way as well.

Thanks, Vikash. Operator, we'll take our next question please.

Your next question will come from John Hodulik with UBS.

Great. Thank you, guys. Maybe just can we get some additional color on sort of the competitive environment? I think Chris or Jessica, you guys sort of laid out what you're seeing in each of the segments. Are you seeing more pressure on fixed wireless with AT&T's efforts in that area? On the fiber side, it seems like there's an aggressive promotional environment, especially around converged offerings.

Just wondering if that's having an impact. On the satellite side, obviously a lot of focus on these LEO constellations. Are you seeing any pressure in rural markets or do you expect that to intensify over the next couple of years? Thanks.

Goodness. John, there's a lot in there. Let me try to start from the very top about the operating environment and competitive environment. You heard a little bit in our commentary. Our issue right now really is a top of funnel issue. What do I mean by that? Our yield at the point of sale is as strong as ever. Our churn remains at historical lows, and that's really supported by the value of the products and everything that we're doing to bundle in, which is driving churn lower.

The external factors on top of that funnel, which I'll come back to some of the specifics that you asked in just a second, but the top of the funnel external factors, they're really the same, which is that we have new competition, and any form of new competition has impact. Yes, we see the continued footprint expansion from cell phone Internet where AT&T has taken the place of others have slowed down, but AT&T has filled that gap with a fixed wireless access product that originally they said they didn't think made a whole lot of sense.

On the other hand, the pace of gigabit overbuild growth, it continues at the same pace it's been, and so there's nothing really new there. Our share in those fiber overlap areas, as Jessica mentioned, including particularly mature fiber overlap areas, that remains above the competition generally across our footprint. The promotional activity, I guess is the big question there too, is did it vary, yes, throughout the quarter, it was up and down, and it varied by competitor and during the course of the quarter, but it is not a fundamental change in the level of promotional activity.

The external side, we have a continued muted housing environment with slow household formation and as we talked about before, low move rates and mobile substitution growth. It's still there, but it seems to be slowing a little bit, hopefully. What does that all mean? If you step back, our yield across all channels, it's good and improving. Churn's low.

Issues about considering more consideration and sales traffic at the top of the funnel, and that really comes down to, I think, continued improvement in our service reputation, our marketing, our offer expressions, and the way that we're using mobile and video really to drive broadband. We're fully focused on those areas. I'm not going to tell you we're sitting here waiting on a better housing environment, which I do think will happen.

In the meantime, we're focused on what we can do, and there's an opportunity to be an even better operator here along the way. Through both the external conditions and our own efforts, I think we can get back to broadband growth. That was your first big question. The second was on AT&T and fixed wireless access entry, which they are filling the gap where lower growth from others has subsided or the growth rates are subsiding. I think that answers that. The converged offer that we're seeing from other providers, look, there's a bit of flattery that's going on there because everything that we do seems to be copied.

Even the branding of our Spectrum One, I think, has been mimicked, but its capabilities are limited in terms of footprint, where we have the ability to provide convergence in 100% of the footprint. You're seeing multiple competitors come out and try to talk about a savings guarantee. They don't do that against us. We do a savings guarantee against AT&T-Mobile, and Verizon. We guarantee $1,000 of savings.

You saw that kind of copied, even on the service commitment. If you take a look at the fine print on others who copied our service commitment, it's not the same. We actually provide a guarantee, and that means that we'll actually pick up the phone and not just call you back when we don't, and we'll show up on the same day if you have a service or installation.

Charter Communications (CHTR) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Company Participants