Altice USA buys Morris Broadband in $310M deal

Altice USA snapped up Morris Broadband, a provider of high-speed Internet and cable TV services to customers in North Carolina. The deal, which is valued at $310 million, will expand Altice’s operations in North Carolina where it already has a presence through its 2015 acquisition of Suddenlink.

Morris Broadband is a division of Morris Communications, which is a privately held media company based in Georgia that also owns newspapers, radio stations and billboards. The company has about 36,500 residential and business customers in western North Carolina and its broadband footprint includes approximately 89,000 homes passed giving it about a 35% broadband penetration rate.

Altice said that with this purchase of Morris Broadband, North Carolina will be the sixth largest state for the company’s operations in terms of number of residential customers.  The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter and Altice said that it expects to realize the full value of the transaction within two years of closing.

Altice USA reported fourth quarter total revenue of $2.54 billion, an increase of 2.5% year-over-year. That increase was driven primarily by a 14% growth in broadband revenue from the same quarter in 2019.  

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Altice says it has 1-Gig broadband capability available across 92% of its footprint, and in the fourth quarter it saw a 41% increase in sales of its 1-Gig plans to customers, up from 29% in the third quarter. The company also said that at the end of 2020 it covered nearly 1 million homes with its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technology and its sell-in rate to new customers was 58% in areas where FTTH is available.