Charter And Comcast Shares Fall On Hard Times, Look Ripe For Rebound

It has been about five months since I outlined the valuation disconnect between the two leading consumer telecommunications providers in the United States in a post entitled Is the Enthusiasm for Charter Communications Getting Overdone?  Charter (CHTR) and Comcast (CMCSA) together provide nearly half of the country’s households with cable, broadband, and phone service. A lot has happened since then, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit the situation.

It turns out that my post last August roughly marked the short-term peak, and shares have fallen about 30% since:

Whereas the shares near $400 seemed very overpriced compared with the likes of Comcast (11.5x EV/EBITDA vs 8.6x), they now appear closer to fair value at around 8.8x my 2018 EBITDA estimate. Comcast has also hit a rough patch in terms of stock performance, on the heels of its bid for UK’s Sky Plc, which would further entrench them into the pay television world. While CHTR has fallen 30%, CMCSA has dropped 20%, and now fetches $32 per share, or just 7x my estimate of 2018 EBITDA.

In my mind, Comcast looks very cheap and Charter appears to be reasonably priced, without factoring in any upside they could see from increasing prices on broadband services (they are priced well below Comcast currently), or from their upcoming cellular phone service offering, which promises to look very similar to Comcast’s recently launched and fast-growing Xfinity Mobile service.

My wife recently switched from Sprint to Xfinity Mobile and is paying $12 for every 1 GB of data usage, with no additional charges other than the phone payment itself. Having switched to Google Fi from Sprint earlier this year, I had planned on adding her to my plan upon the termination of her contract, but Xfinity Mobile is actually an even better deal because Google Fi pairs a $15 plan charge along with a $10 per GB data rate. You can add family members for just $10 more )rather than another $15), but it would have cost $20 to add my wife to my plan, whereas Xfinity charges just $12.