The biggest surprise out of Comcast's announcement yesterday that they were spinning out nearly all of their cable channels (including CNBC) wasn't that we were leaving Comcast. It was that we were leaving NBCUniversal.
NBC, after all, was a founding partner in CNBC (which originally stood for "Consumer News and Business Channel") back in 1989. It's so intertwined with our existence, we're all still trying to figure out what exactly this separation next year will mean. Reporters often travel between networks seamlessly. Our cafeteria was just promoting Universal's new "Wicked" movie. Heck, our email addresses all end in "nbcuni.com"!
Now, we're orphaned from the $164 billion Comcast/NBC mothership, slated to be part of a spun out entity comprised of seven or so cable networks and a few digital properties that analysts estimate will be worth somewhere between $12 billion and $16 billion.
But Comcast had to do something. The shares have basically gone nowhere in five years, except for a brief Covid-induced sugar high, while the S&P 500 has doubled. Unfortunately, the timing of this move may be a little too late to get investors more excited. Comcast was only up 1.5% on the news today, and is still in the red this year.
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"A standalone spinoff...makes little financial sense," wrote Barclays analysts yesterday, "[and] feels a little unambitious." Questioning whether the new entity will be left with enough resources--after losing, for instance, joint bargaining power with NBC against the carriers--they added, "it is tough to see this as anything other than potentially the first step of other larger initiatives at some point."
The trouble is, other similarly sized and positioned entities--Paramount, and Warner Brothers Discovery--have a lot of debt. That would seem to make acquiring them less attractive for our new "SpinCo." Disney, meanwhile, just reiterated that is not divesting ABC, FX, or its other networks. If SpinCo can't or won't be part of major industry consolidation, then it may end up in the hands of private equity, as our Alex Sherman suggested.
The larger move for Comcast here, as many analysts speculate, could be an effort to avoid regulatory blowback if it pursues a merger with Charter that could create the first national broadband player in a deregulatory Trump administration. The company not only has to boost performance, but to do so as competition from fixed wireless and even Starlink is expected to grow in the coming decade.
Money Report
And acquiring NBCUniversal from General Electric on the cheap was actually a great move for Comcast that paid off pretty well for much of last decade. So perhaps they have some savvy ideas for "SpinCo" now up their sleeves.
See you at 1 p.m...
Kelly
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