Comcast Business targets strategic acquisitions and international expansion to fuel long-term growth

TBR perspective  

Comcast Business remains in an enviable position and is an outlier in the telecom industry. The cable operator’s business unit continues to post double-digit revenue growth and is taking market share from a range of competitors in the U.S. The company’s core value proposition is its powerful DOCSIS 3.1-based, hybrid-fiber-coax (HFC) fixed access platform, which provides significantly better value in terms of connectivity performance to price paid compared to legacy technologies such as MPLS and DSL. Comcast Business sees at least another $60 billion in market share that is available to take from less competitively positioned incumbent telecom operators in its domestic market. This sizable addressable opportunity will continue to feed the Comcast Business machine for at least the next few years.

TBR believes Comcast Business also has significant opportunity to sustain long-term revenue growth through international expansion and the company’s evolving sales and marketing strategies. The company is pivoting from a focus on selling its products horizontally across verticals to a solution-centric, verticalized approach, evident in the acquisition of Deep Blue Communications, which specializes in the hospitality, retail and entertainment industries, and also evident in the company’s new product offerings and design principles. Comcast Business is also expanding outside the U.S. and is building presence via acquisitions, in Canada via iTel, in the Caribbean and Mexico via Deep Blue Communications, and in Europe via Sky. Over time, TBR believes the shift to build its international footprint will help Comcast Business win more of the Fortune 1000 companies that have sites in multiple countries and that require global services. In addition, Comcast Business’ acquisition of BluVector, an AI-powered cybersecurity technology company, points to another trend at the company, which is to build out robust security capabilities.

The 2019 Comcast Business Analyst Conference highlighted the company’s business progress and financial performance and detailed initiatives that will spur long-term growth including new acquisitions and portfolio developments as well as Comcast Business’ evolving go-to-market strategies. The event included a State of the Business update by Comcast Business President Bill Stemper as well as presentations focused on areas including the company’s recent Deep Blue Communications acquisition, the ActiveCore SDN platform, network security and Comcast Business’ fast-growing enterprise division.