Comcast Business finds enterprise growth in branch offices, sees Q2 revenue jump to $1.4B

Comcast Business' (NASDAQ: CMCSA) dominant revenue source may still be from small business customers, but the division is seeing new growth from mid-sized and large businesses. During the second quarter, the unit reported that revenue overall rose 17 percent to $1.4 billion.

The cable MSO noted during its second quarter earnings call that it is seeing mid-sized business revenue grow at an "attractive rate and its contribution as a percentage of total business revenue is increasing."

Neil Smit, president and CEO of Comcast Cable and SVP of Comcast, told investors that while small business is still the major growth driver, they are signing deals to provide connectivity to branch offices of large businesses.

A typical customer could be a bank that has main headquarters site and multiple branches or a retailer.

Comcast Wi-Fi Pro

Comcast Business has added more tools for its customers such as its Wi-Fi Pro mobile app. (Source: Comcast)

"Concerning the business services, the majority of the growth is still coming from small and medium size," Smit said during the earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. "We stood up the enterprise business September of 2015 and we're growing customers."

Smit added that they "are doing deals with other MSOs" to extend their network footprint to satisfy multi-site business requirements.

Wawa is one example of a multi-site large customer won by Comcast Business. The service provider has equipped 700 of Wawa's store locations with Xfinity public Wi-Fi in the stores and employee Wi-Fi within each store.

Smit said that the network it built for Wawa was conducted "out of footprint and in footprint."

A dominant source of business service revenue came from small businesses, accounting for nearly 75 percent of Comcast's revenue and 60 percent of its growth. The cable MSO reported an uptick in the number of small business customers as well as continued growth in its medium-sized business customers.

To make itself more palatable to large businesses, Comcast has continued to extend fiber into more business districts.

In June, Comcast Business announced plans to invest over $9 million over the next 12 months to expand its fiber network in Virginia, enabling it to reach over 3,000 businesses with Ethernet services, for example.

But fiber expansion is just one element of Comcast Business' plan. The service provider also made the Microsoft 365 platform available through its cloud application marketplace for small and medium-sized businesses, easing the SMB market's transition to the cloud.

Overall, Comcast's second quarter consolidated revenue increased 2.8 percent to $19.3 billion.

For more:
- see the earnings release
- here's FierceCable's coverage
- read the Seeking Alpha earnings transcript

Related articles:
Comcast lights Gig Ethernet for Maryland's Bethesda Green business incubator
Comcast Business boosts enterprise services with AWS connectivity to 1M Ethernet-enabled buildings
Comcast Business dedicates $1.2M to extend fiber, Ethernet to Bellevue, Wash. office parks
Comcast Business surpasses $5B revenue run rate, sees growing traction in enterprise segment

This article was updated on July 29 to correct that Comcast Business signed a deal with Wawa, not Huawei.