Altice USA made sweeping changes to its executive leadership team, notably hiring two Comcast veterans, as it announced Q4 results in which it continued to gain ground in its fiber expansion.
Marc Sirota will serve as Altice’s new CFO effective March 1, replacing Michael Grau who has decided to step down. Sirota spent over two decades at Comcast, where he held a variety of executive positions including CFO of Comcast Business’ Central Division and SVP of Enterprise Business Intelligence. Grau will stay on as an advisor to Altice CEO Dennis Mathew until July, assisting the company with the transition.
“I've known Marc for many years, and I'm confident that he will help drive discipline in the organization as we execute against our growth strategy and deliver value to our shareholders,” Mathew said during Altice’s Q4 earnings call. Mathew, who took the reins as Altice CEO in October, is also a Comcast vet.
Meanwhile, David Williams will take on the role of Chief Revenue Officer, replacing Matthew Grover, who has decided to retire after more than 20 years at the company. Williams recently served as CMO and SVP of sales for Comcast’s Central Division.
Altice also hired Leroy Williams – formerly chief product officer for Samsung Electronics America – for the newly created role of Chief Growth Officer. He’ll be responsible for competitive growth plans across Optimum’s residential and commercial businesses, product strategy and management, among other duties.
Lastly, Altice elevated SVP of Customer Experience Shuvankar Roy to the new role of Chief Customer Experience Officer.
“With a sharp operational and financial focus, deep technical and industry experience, and proven leadership capabilities, the team is collectively focused on partnering to accelerate our growth strategy,” added Mathew.
The new hire announcements came as Altice posted Q4 results showing it ended the year with 2.16 million fiber-to-the-home passings, a target that the company anticipated when reporting Q3 results. It added over 251,000 new passings in Q4 and over 988,000 passings for 2022 – representing the highest amount of incremental passings to date.
Mathew noted while most of these fiber upgrades were concentrated in the New York tri-state area, Altice in Q4 completed its first few thousand passings in its western footprint. The company added 36,000 fiber broadband customers in the quarter, ending 2022 with 172,000 total fiber customers.
For 2023, Altice expects to add another 900,000 passings across its footprint, which will bring its year-end tally to more than 3 million locations passed. Mathew said Altice will press ahead with building out fiber in the tri-state area, “as we've made great progress here and it's a relatively low cost for us to upgrade.”
“Across the western footprint though, we're going to look to be more opportunistic about where we upgrade for fiber in the near term, focusing on areas that give us the best return on investment,” he went on to say.
As for competition, Mathew said Verizon is 70% overbuilt in Altice’s eastern footprint. Frontier Communications is another fiber player with a “very mature full product set” in that market. In the West, half of Altice’s footprint is being overbuilt by AT&T, with the other 50% consisting of “fiber overbuilders in different pockets of the footprint.”
Residential broadband net losses totaled 8,000 in Q4, which Mathew remarked was a “significant improvement in the quarterly trend.” Still, that number was higher than the 2,000 broadband net losses in the year-ago quarter. All told, Altice ended 2022 with around 103,000 residential broadband losses.
“As we've shown in Q4 broadband results, we have many different levers to improve performance across this part of our footprint without needing to immediately upgrade everywhere for FTTH,” Mathew said, such as completing DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades in the remainder of its western footprint.
Financials
Revenue dropped 6% year-over-year to $2.37 billion, with Altice reporting net income of $193.1 million, compared to $251.7 million in Q4 2021. By segment, residential revenue for the quarter declined 5% to $1.82 billion, Business Services revenue dropped 9.3% to $368.3 million and News and Advertising revenue decreased 10.8% to $151.8 million.
Adjusted EBITDA slid 15.7% YoY to $913.3 million. Analysts at New Street Research indicated operating trends remain a challenge at Altice.
“While there was some recovery in broadband trends this quarter, it came with a big decline in EBITDA,” NSR said in a Wednesday note. “The new CEO has made a clean sweep of senior management, and a coherent operating plan is starting to come into view; however, it will take time to deliver results and longer still for EBITDA and FCF (free cash flow) to recover to a point that can support current valuation.”