Cablevision shares fell 9.7 percent Tuesday after the company reported...
Cablevision shares fell 9.7 percent Tuesday after the company reported Q4 earnings, signaled it won’t soon name a new chief operating officer and said it will spend significantly this year on some projects. It was the first earnings report and…
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earnings teleconference since the departure of COO Tom Rutledge, who now runs Charter. With Rutledge gone, Cablevision CEO James Dolan appears to be holding the reins of Cablevision for the foreseeable future, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield wrote: “This should end speculation that the company is actively recruiting replacements for either Rutledge” or John Bickham, another recently-departed Cablevision executive. Dolan indicated the company would be spending significantly on projects such as remote-storage DVR and Wi-Fi this year, meaning investor estimates about free cash flow might be too high, Greenfield wrote. Cablevision’s Q4 results were surprisingly good, but guidance for 2012 was surprisingly bad, Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett wrote investors. “Taken together they illustrate neatly the bind that the company faces,” he said: “Their market is saturated, their penetration levels … are all the highest in the industry (by far). And they face higher overlap with Verizon’s FiOS than any other cable peer.” The steep dip in Cablevision’s share price may make it a good investment now, Miller Tabak analyst David Joyce wrote investors, upgrading his rating on the stock to “Buy” from “Neutral.” Q4 sales gained 7.3 percent from a year earlier to $1.69 billion, the company said. The company lost 14,000 video customers during the quarter, but gained 20,000 broadband and 31,000 voice customers, it said. It ended the quarter with 3.25 million video, 2.96 million broadband and 2.36 million phone customers. Profit fell 46 percent to $60.6 million related to $40 million in income from discontinued operations the company recorded in the year-earlier period.