Comcast Makes Formal $31B Bid for Sky

The Eagles-winning Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics — both televised by NBC — boosted Comcast Corp.’s first quarter revenues by 10.7 percent even as telecom competition and cord-cutting ate into its television customer base, the company reported on Wednesday.

According to philly.com, Comcast also formalized on Wednesday morning its $31 billion bid for the  U.K.-based Sky satellite-TV and media company, which has more than 23 million customers in the Britain and Europe. The total price with debt will be about $40 billion.

“Sky has a strong business, excellent customer loyalty, and a value brand,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement. “It is led by a terrific management team who we look forward to working with to build and grow this business.”

Wall Street has battered Comcast’s stock since the company first expressed its desire to buy Sky earlier this year. Rupert Murdoch-controlled 21st Century Fox also is attempting to buy Sky but regulators have stood in his way.

Meanwhile, Comcast lost 96,000 Xfinity TV customers in the quarter, a sharp contrast to the 42,000 it added a year ago, the company said in its first-quarter earnings release.

Comcast also on-boarded 379,000 new high-speed internet customers as Comcast inexorably shifts away from TV distribution and into what it calls a “connectivity” business.

Revenues were $22.8 billion in the quarter compared with $20.6 billion in the year-ago period. Comcast said that the NFL championship game in February and the Olympics accounts for $1.6 billion of the revenue.

Without those two TV ad-rich televised events on Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, the Philadelphia company’s revenues rose about 2 percent.

Profits were $3.1 billion compared with $2.6 billion.