There's been a lot of anger and frustration directed at leadership lately, and given everything that's changing, that's completely understandable. But I wanted to step back from the noise for a moment and look at where we actually stand, soberly and with the numbers in front of us.
Let's start with the basics: we're a company that makes a lot of money. In 2025, we generated $124 billion in revenue, $36 billion in EBITDA, and $20 billion in net income. Our balance sheet carries about $90 billion in net debt — a large number in isolation, but very manageable set against our revenue and profitability.
So why is our stock falling, and why does it feel like every quarter brings another round of cost cuts?
The answer isn't in where we are today. It's in where the business is headed. I'll set NBCUniversal aside for this and focus on our Connectivity business, since that's the bulk of our revenue. Let's go through it line by line.
Broadband brought in $26 billion last year — 20% of our total revenue. It's declining, and faster than most of us expected. We lost 650,000 of our 29 million subscribers, and to slow that decline, we've had to lower prices across the board: average price per customer fell 3.8% last quarter alone. To put that in perspective, a 3.8% price drop on $26 billion is roughly $1 billion in lost revenue — and lost profit — from pricing alone. Add the subscriber losses, and that's another half a billion. The uncomfortable truth is that the driver here isn't primarily service quality, even though that plays a role — it's competition. We used to compete against DSL as our main rival. Today we're being overbuilt almost everywhere, by fiber, by fixed wireless, and soon by satellite too. If that trend continues, and there's every reason to think it will, we're looking at millions more subscribers lost in the years ahead.
Cable TV is still a cash cow, also generating around $26 billion in revenue in 2025. But our subscriber base has fallen from 25 million to 10 million over the past decade-plus. This is structural, not cyclical, decline. The only reason revenue has held up this well is a combination of steady price increases and our success at retaining higher-value customers. But make no mistake: the decline here is terminal. This business will eventually disappear — what we're managing is the pace of that decline, not whether it happens. Our advertising revenue, another $4 billion, moves down right alongside it.
Landline voice is something many of us already think of as "dead," but it's still about $3 billion in revenue, and it's shrinking roughly 20% a year.
Comcast Business brings in $10 billion. The problem here is that our SMB segment faces the exact same competitive pressure as residential, and we're losing customers at an accelerating pace as fiber and fixed wireless take share. Enterprise can still grow, but at meaningfully lower margins — it's a far more labor-intensive business, and enterprise customers expect deeper discounts.
Wireless brings in about $5 billion — $1.3 billion in equipment, $3.6 billion in service. Once you account for phone subsidies to win new customers, churn, operating costs, and the fees we pay our MVNO partner, this is a thin-margin business. It can absolutely keep growing, but how much profit it can actually generate is a real question — and the growth ceiling is capped by our broadband base. As broadband shrinks, so does the ceiling for wireless.
Putting it all together, here's how I'd forecast each piece going forward:
Broadband: $26B, declining ~5% a year
TV: $26B, declining ~10% a year
Advertising: $4B, declining ~10% a year
Landline Voice: $3B, declining ~20% a year
Comcast Business: $10B, flat at best
Wireless: $5B, growing ~15% a year
(There's also roughly $5 billion in international connectivity — that's Sky, and it moves over to NBCUniversal as part of the separation.)
Here's the part that makes this especially painful: our margin structure. When we lose a broadband subscriber, our costs barely move — nearly all of our cost base is fixed. The contribution margin on the last customer we add, or lose, is over 90%. That means when a customer leaves, profit falls almost as much as revenue does.
So here's where that leaves us: a business that's declining quickly, with margins shrinking just as fast. Cutting overhead and discretionary spend is the lever we have in the near term to protect the business — but let's be clear-eyed about it: that lever doesn't fix the underlying problem. It just buys us time.