Dropping an opinion here that I hope actually reaches someone, since I've heard senior leadership is listening for input right now. I also know a lot of people here would be curious how this might all play out. Here’s a take to sit with.
Start with the pieces. Comcast is splitting NBCUniversal and Sky off into their own company. What's left? connectivity, the broadband and cable business, becomes the core company going forward. For the first time, this business has to stand on its own in front of investors without NBCUniversal's cash flow underneath it. Right as that's happening, Jason Armstrong stood up at Goldman Sachs and called this the largest cost transformation in company history, billions in savings are coming. In the same breath, he said broadband losses aren't improving this quarter. Stock dropped over 6% that day, and it dropped on the subscriber number, not the savings number. Wall Street got both stories in the same sentence and only reacted to ONE of them. That already tells you cost efficiency isn't what moves this stock.
These moves feel like a room full of CFOs racing to cut the org chart while staying completely tone deaf to what the Customer actually experiences. That matters because cost transformation and Customer stabilization aren't the same lever. This is an internal savings story, not a Customer story, full stop. Cutting management layers or overhead shows up in margin next quarter. It does nothing to change why a household picks a $30 fiber offer over us.
Even if the program runs perfectly, it's solving a different problem than the one actually dragging on the stock, and the timing makes that worse. Connectivity is about to be judged as a standalone, and a standalone broadband company showing margin discipline while still bleeding subscribers doesn't read as disciplined. It reads like a company that got its cost base in order because it couldn't get its Customer numbers in order.
The earmarking backs this up. Armstrong pointed to wireless expansion and monetizing data as where some of this money goes, not broadband pricing, not service, not the product the Customer is actually leaving over.
Broadband lost roughly 650K subscribers last year and another 230K plus already this year, and fiber keeps expanding into our footprint.
We've also underperformed the market for close to 3 years straight now, well below where the stock sat at its highs. Trimming layers doesn't touch any of that, because none of it was ever built around the Customer to begin with.
The take is that this doesn't just fail to move the stock, it makes it worse.
Play it forward for a second, connectivity goes public on its own, still losing subscribers, still facing the same pricing pressure, now carrying a cost story instead of a Customer story. That's a demand side problem being treated with a supply side fix, and Wall Street has already shown which side it prices. The Customer sees nothing change either, same price, same service, same frustration. Cutting costs without moving those numbers doesn't buy goodwill from either side. It just proves the transformation shrank the business instead of fixing the thing that's actually been dragging it down for years, because the Customer was never the one being optimized for.