Comcast Corporation (CMCSA) - Company Research

Last Updated: 25 August 2026

Comcast is in the middle of dismantling itself. In January 2026 it spun off its cable networks as Versant Media Group; in June 2026 it announced it will spin off NBCUniversal and Sky as well, leaving a pure-play connectivity company behind. Underneath that structural noise the operating picture is unusually clean: broadband subscribers are still shrinking, wireless is growing faster than it ever has, Peacock has just turned its first quarterly profit, and the shares trade on roughly eight times trailing GAAP earnings. This report sets out what the filings actually say, without ratings or price targets.

1. Company Snapshot

Field	Value
Company	Comcast Corporation
Ticker / Exchange	CMCSA, Nasdaq Global Select Market
Sector	Communication services — cable connectivity, media, studios and theme parks
Headquarters	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
CEO / Leadership	Brian L. Roberts (Chairman & Co-Chief Executive Officer) and Michael J. Cavanagh (Co-Chief Executive Officer); Jason S. Armstrong, Chief Financial Officer
Employees	Approximately 179,000 on a full-time-equivalent basis (FY2025 Form 10-K; includes Versant staff pre-spin)
Revenue (FY2025, year to 31 Dec 2025)	$123,707m, essentially flat year on year
Net income attributable to Comcast (FY2025)	$19,998m, including a $7.1bn after-tax gain on the Hulu stake sale
GAAP diluted EPS (FY2025)	$5.39
Adjusted EPS (FY2025)	$4.31
Market capitalisation (25 Aug 2026)	Approximately $95.9bn at $27.02 per share
Shares outstanding	3,539,192,198 Class A plus 9,444,375 Class B (10-Q cover page, 15 Jul 2026)
Dividend	$0.33 per quarter, $1.32 annualised, held flat for 2026
Homes and businesses passed	More than 65 million
Most recent results	Q2 2026, quarter ended 30 June 2026, reported 23 July 2026

2. Bull and Bear Case

Bull Case

• Sum-of-the-parts unlock: Two spin-offs in eighteen months separate a slow-growing but hugely cash-generative connectivity utility from a volatile media business. The shares rose more than 20% pre-market on the 29 June 2026 announcement, which is the market's own verdict on how much conglomerate discount had accumulated.
• Wireless is compounding fast off a tiny base: Domestic wireless lines crossed 10 million in Q2 2026 with a record 448,000 net adds, the third consecutive record quarter. Penetration is still only around 7% of addressable lines in the footprint and roughly 16% of Comcast's own broadband customers, and the lines run on leased Verizon and T-Mobile capacity, so incremental margin is high.
• Peacock has crossed into profit: Peacock delivered adjusted EBITDA of positive $189m in Q2 2026, a $290m swing from a $101m loss a year earlier, on 48 million paid subscribers and $1.9bn of quarterly revenue. Losses that consumed over $700m of improvement in FY2025 alone have now inflected.
• Cash generation is genuinely large relative to the price: FY2025 free cash flow was a record $19,235m against a market capitalisation of roughly $95.9bn. Even on the trailing twelve months to June 2026 the business converted around $32.5bn of operating cash flow.
• Business Services is the quiet compounder: Q2 2026 revenue of $2,671m grew 3.7% with adjusted EBITDA up 5.0% and margin expanding 60 basis points to 56.7% — a segment growing profitably while the consumer side fights for volume.

Bear Case

• The core product is still losing customers: Domestic residential broadband customers have fallen from 29,373k at end-2024 to 28,486k at 30 June 2026. Q2 2026 lost another 167,000, an improvement of only 34,000 year on year, and domestic broadband revenue actually fell 5.5% to $6,280m.
• Competitors are winning the same customers: Verizon added 348,000 broadband customers in Q2 2026 and AT&T added over one million advanced connectivity customers in the same quarter, while Comcast and Charter both lost subscribers. Fixed wireless and subsidised fibre overbuild are structural, not cyclical.
• Capital returns have been curtailed on both sides: The dividend was held flat in January 2026 for the first time in eighteen years, and the buyback that shrank the share count 5% during 2025 was paused on 29 June 2026 pending the separation.
• Two concurrent separations carry real execution and tax risk: Comcast has already disclosed the risk of significant tax liability if the Versant separation is not treated as tax-free, and transaction costs ran to $483m in FY2025. The NBCUniversal and Sky spin adds regulatory approval, financing and debt-allocation risk on top.
• 2027 faces a brutal event comparison: The first half of 2026 carried the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Super Bowl LX and the FIFA World Cup. None of those recur in 2027, and the roughly $2.5bn a year of NBA rights cost stays.

3. Business Segments

Comcast realigned its reporting segments with effect from Q1 2026. Media now excludes Versant's historical results, regional sports networks moved to Corporate & Other, and Xumo moved into Residential Connectivity & Platforms. The table below therefore uses the first half of 2026, which is the most recent period reported on the current segment basis, drawn from Comcast's Q1 and Q2 2026 earnings releases. Percentages are of consolidated revenue of $61,396m for the six months.

Segment	% of revenue	What it is
Residential Connectivity & Platforms	56.2% ($34,447m)	Consumer broadband, wireless, video, voice and Xumo across the domestic cable footprint plus Sky's international connectivity and television
Business Services Connectivity	8.7% ($5,311m)	Broadband, voice, wireless and enterprise networking sold to small, medium and large businesses
Media	21.1% ($12,971m)	NBC and Telemundo broadcast, remaining cable networks, Peacock streaming and advertising sales
Studios	10.5% ($6,466m)	Universal Pictures, Focus Features, DreamWorks Animation and Universal television production and licensing
Theme Parks	7.7% ($4,744m)	Universal Destinations & Experiences parks and resorts in Orlando, Hollywood, Japan, Beijing, Las Vegas and Texas
Corporate & Other and eliminations	Net negative after eliminations	Regional sports networks, corporate overhead, and the elimination of inter-segment content licensing

4. Business Model and Moat

How it makes money. The bulk of Comcast's profit comes from selling recurring monthly connectivity over a hybrid fibre-coaxial network that reaches more than 65 million homes and businesses. That network was built decades ago and is being upgraded incrementally rather than rebuilt, so the marginal cost of an additional subscriber is small and the incremental margin on price is very high. Residential Connectivity & Platforms alone supplied 56% of first-half 2026 revenue. Around this core sit three cyclical, hit-driven businesses — Media, Studios and Theme Parks — that consume capital and produce lumpy returns.

The moat, and where it is eroding. The durable advantage is the sunk cost of the physical plant: replicating a passing network across tens of millions of homes costs tens of billions and takes a decade. That advantage held for twenty years. It is now being attacked from two directions at once — fixed wireless access riding on spare mobile capacity, which has near-zero incremental build cost, and government-subsidised fibre overbuild inside Comcast's own footprint, which removes the economics that used to deter entrants. The 10-K names both explicitly.

The convergence answer. Comcast's response is to bundle wireless with broadband, using mobile virtual network operator agreements with Verizon and, from 2026 for business, T-Mobile. This lets Comcast sell mobile without owning spectrum, and the evidence is that it works as a retention tool: wireless lines grew from 7,826k at end-2024 to 10,187k by June 2026. The trade-off is that broadband average revenue is falling, because the go-to-market pivot to simplified everyday pricing with a five-year price guarantee buys volume with price.

Content as a scale business. Media and Studios rest on the economics of sports and franchise rights, where the cost is fixed and the return depends entirely on reach. The eleven-year NBA and WNBA agreement worth roughly $27bn, Sunday Night Football, the Premier League and the Olympics all follow the same logic. It is a real moat where rights are exclusive and long, and a real liability when audiences fragment faster than the contract amortises.

5. Financial Health

All figures below are taken from Comcast's own quarterly earnings releases and Form 10-K filings. Long-term debt is the non-current balance at each fiscal year end. Comcast reports adjusted EPS, which excludes amortisation of acquisition-related intangibles, investment gains and losses and certain other items.

Fiscal Year	Revenue ($m)	YoY %	GAAP EPS	Adjusted EPS	Dividend/share	Long-term debt (YE)
FY2021	116,385	+12.4%	$3.04	$3.23	$1.00	$92,718m
FY2022	121,427	+4.3%	$1.21	$3.64	$1.08	$93,068m
FY2023	121,572	+0.1%	$3.71	$3.98	$1.16	$95,021m
FY2024	123,731	+1.8%	$4.14	$4.33	$1.24	$94,186m
FY2025	123,707	−0.02%	$5.39	$4.31	$1.32	$92,979m

Two distortions matter. FY2022 GAAP EPS of $1.21 is depressed by an $8,583m goodwill and long-lived asset impairment, overwhelmingly against Sky. FY2025 GAAP EPS of $5.39 is inflated by a $7.1bn after-tax gain on the sale of the Hulu stake to Disney, which is why GAAP EPS rose 30% while adjusted EPS fell 0.6%. The FY2024 to FY2025 dividend figures are confirmed against the SEC XBRL tag CommonStockDividendsPerShareDeclared, and the FY2024 and FY2025 long-term debt balances against LongTermDebtAndCapitalLeaseObligations.

Quarter / Half	Revenue	Adjusted EPS	GAAP EPS
Q2 2026 (to 30 Jun 2026)	$29,940m	$1.04	$0.99
Q1 2026 (to 31 Mar 2026)	$31,457m	$0.79	$0.60
Q4 2025 (to 31 Dec 2025)	$32,310m	$0.84	$0.60
Q3 2025 (to 30 Sep 2025)†	$31,198m	$1.12	$0.90
Q2 2025 (to 30 Jun 2025)	$30,313m	$1.25	$2.98
FY2025 total (to 31 Dec 2025)	$123,707m	$4.31	$5.39

† Q3 2025 revenue is derived by subtracting the reported fourth quarter and first half from the reported full year; the EPS figures are as reported. Q2 2025 GAAP EPS of $2.98 contains the Hulu gain and is not comparable.

Cash flow and balance sheet. FY2025 net cash from operating activities was $33,643m, capital expenditure $11,750m, cash paid for capitalised software and other intangibles $2,658m, and depreciation and amortisation $16,210m. Free cash flow on Comcast's own definition was a record $19,235m, helped by cash taxes falling to $755m from $7,096m after an internal reorganisation. At 30 June 2026 total debt was $90,381m ($84,264m non-current plus $6,117m current) against cash of $7,661m, so net debt was approximately $82,720m. Total equity was $89,770m and total assets $257,548m. Debt fell $8.6bn during the first half of 2026 as $7,344m was repaid against only $1,990m of new borrowing.

6. Valuation Metrics

Raw metrics, August 2026. Not opinions on whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

Metric	Value
Market cap	Approximately $95.9bn (3,548.6m shares across both classes at $27.02)
Trailing P/E (GAAP)	8.7x on trailing twelve-month GAAP EPS of $3.09 (Q3 2025 $0.90 plus Q4 2025 $0.60 plus Q1 2026 $0.60 plus Q2 2026 $0.99). On trailing adjusted EPS of $3.79 the same market cap implies 7.1x.
P/E (forward)	Approximately 7.5x
P/S (TTM)	0.77x (market cap $95.9bn / trailing twelve-month revenue $124,904m)
Enterprise value	Approximately $178.6bn (market cap $95.9bn plus total debt $90.4bn less cash $7.7bn, per the 30 June 2026 balance sheet)
EV/EBITDA (TTM)	5.2x. EBITDA is trailing operating income of $18,317m plus trailing depreciation and amortisation of $15,760m, giving $34,077m; the wider DepreciationDepletionAndAmortization total is used rather than depreciation alone. On Comcast's own trailing adjusted EBITDA of approximately $34.4bn the multiple is 5.2x on the same enterprise value.
P/FCF	4.7x (market cap $95.9bn / free cash flow $20.4bn, where FCF is trailing operating cash flow of approximately $32.5bn less capital expenditure of approximately $12.1bn). On Comcast's own definition, which also deducts $2.6bn of cash paid for intangibles, trailing FCF is $17.8bn and the multiple is 5.4x.
Price/book	1.1x (market cap $95.9bn / total equity $89.8bn at 30 June 2026)
Dividend yield	4.9% ($1.32 annualised at $27.02), held flat for 2026
52-week high	$32.86
52-week low	$21.28
Short interest (% of float)	2.07% (72,592,374 shares short against a 3,511m free float, settlement date 31 July 2026)
Days to cover	1.99 days on average trading volume, same settlement date

Note that both the enterprise value and the EBITDA multiple are struck before the NBCUniversal and Sky separation, which will reallocate an as-yet-undisclosed share of the $90.4bn debt load between two companies. Readers can chart the multiples themselves on the ChartsView live charts.

7. What Are They Building

Network upgrade. Comcast is executing a multi-year evolution of its hybrid fibre-coaxial plant rather than a full fibre rebuild. The FY2025 10-K describes the rollout of DOCSIS 4.0 in select markets, which delivers multi-gigabit symmetrical speeds, alongside virtualisation and automation of core network functions. Comcast completed the world's first DOCSIS 4.0 deployment and now offers multi-gigabit downstream to roughly 60% of residential customers, with fibre-to-the-premises reaching symmetrical 10Gbps residential and up to 400Gbps for certain business customers. Connectivity and Platforms capital expenditure was $8.7bn in FY2025, up 5.3%.

Convergence and wireless. Xfinity Mobile is the fastest-growing line in the company: 10,187k lines at 30 June 2026 against 7,826k at end-2024, with record net adds of 364,000, 435,000 and 448,000 in the three most recent quarters. Domestic wireless service revenue grew 14.2% in Q2 2026. The economics rest on mobile virtual network operator agreements with Verizon, and from 2026 business wireless also runs on T-Mobile.

Peacock and sports rights. Peacock reached 48 million paid subscribers and its first profitable quarter in Q2 2026. The strategy is explicitly sports-led: NBA and WNBA under an eleven-year agreement worth roughly $27bn, Sunday Night Football, the Premier League, the Milan Cortina Olympics, Super Bowl LX and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Prices were raised across all tiers on 18 August 2026 ahead of the NFL season, taking the Select tier to $8.99 and Premium to $12.99 a month.

Theme parks. The largest capital programme outside the network. Epic Universe opened in Orlando on 22 May 2025, Universal Horror Unleashed opened in Las Vegas in 2025, Universal Kids Resort opened in Frisco, Texas on 1 July 2026, and Universal United Kingdom Resort near Bedford is a 476-acre, roughly $8bn project with construction beginning in 2026 and opening targeted for 2031.

Reshaping Sky. Sky's German operations were sold on 31 May 2026, and on 7 July 2026 Sky agreed to acquire ITV Media & Entertainment for up to £1.6bn, combining Sky with the ITV channels and ITVX to build a UK commercial streaming platform. ITV Studios is to be separately listed.

8. Competitive Landscape

Comcast now competes on two fronts that barely overlap: connectivity against telecoms operators and cable peers, and content against global streamers. Market capitalisations below were pulled on 25 August 2026.

Peer	Market cap (August 2026)	Key 2025 metric
Netflix (NFLX)	$333.2bn	Q2 2026 revenue of $12.56bn, up 13.4% year on year, with the advertising business tracking towards roughly $3bn of revenue in 2026
Verizon (VZ)	$208.4bn	Q2 2026 broadband net additions of 348,000, comprising 193,000 fixed wireless and 155,000 fibre, with 10.913m fibre connections
T-Mobile US (TMUS)	$195.9bn	Q2 2026 postpaid net account additions of 277,000, down 13% year on year, with postpaid average revenue per account of $152.91
Walt Disney (DIS)	$191.0bn	Combined Disney+ and Hulu streaming profit more than doubled to $712m in the most recent reported quarter
AT&T (T)	$176.0bn	More than one million advanced connectivity net additions in Q2 2026, a record for combined fibre and fixed wireless
Charter Communications (CHTR)	$20.3bn (Class A common equity only)	Q2 2026 broadband net losses of 172,000 and mobile line net additions of 406,000; the $34.5bn Cox transaction closed on 20 August 2026

Comcast at roughly $95.9bn is now worth less than half of Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T or Disney, and under a third of Netflix, while remaining about 4.7 times the common equity value of Charter. Note that Charter's figure excludes the partnership units issued to Cox at closing and therefore understates its total enterprise.

9. Insider Activity

Comcast is led by Brian L. Roberts as Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer alongside Michael J. Cavanagh as Co-Chief Executive Officer, with Jason S. Armstrong as Chief Financial Officer. Under the announced separation, Cavanagh is to become Chief Executive of NBCUniversal and Michael Angelakis, a former Comcast Chief Financial Officer, is to return as Chief Executive of Comcast, with Roberts remaining involved in the leadership of both companies. Insider activity during 2026 has been dominated by option exercises, tax withholding on vesting and estate-planning gifts rather than conviction trading. There has been no open-market insider buying in 2026, and total genuine open-market selling amounts to under $2.3m across three individuals.

Name	Date	Type	Shares	Price	Value	Plan Type
Edward D. Breen	17 Aug 2026	Gift / transfer to trust	62,440	n/a	No cash proceeds	Estate planning, not a 10b5-1 plan
Brian L. Roberts	05 Aug 2026	Gift	204,100	n/a	No cash proceeds	Estate planning, not a 10b5-1 plan
Brian L. Roberts	19 May 2026	Gift	202,500	n/a	No cash proceeds	Estate planning, not a 10b5-1 plan
Jason S. Armstrong	05 Mar 2026	Open-market sale	4,494	$31.73	$142,617	Not flagged as 10b5-1 on the filing
Michael J. Cavanagh	11 Feb 2026	Open-market sale	57,947	$32.66	$1,892,549	Not flagged as 10b5-1 on the filing
Asuka Nakahara	03 Feb 2026	Open-market sale	8,275	$29.70	$245,768	Not flagged as 10b5-1 on the filing
Brian L. Roberts	11 Feb 2026	Option exercise with shares withheld for tax	984,320 exercised, 907,653 withheld	$28.38 strike, $32.70 withholding	Non-cash to the insider	Equity compensation

10. Key Risks

• Broadband subscriber erosion: Domestic residential broadband customers fell from 29,373k at end-2024 to 28,486k at 30 June 2026, and domestic broadband revenue declined 5.5% year on year in Q2 2026 to $6,280m. The pivot to simplified everyday pricing with a five-year guarantee is trading price for volume, and volume has not yet turned positive.
• Fixed wireless and subsidised fibre overbuild: The FY2025 10-K names 5G fixed wireless networks, advanced fibre networks, municipal and power-company networks and federally or state-subsidised overbuilds within Comcast's own footprint as direct competitive threats. Verizon and AT&T both added subscribers in the same quarter Comcast lost them.
• Cord-cutting and margin compression: Domestic video customers fell from 12,523k at end-2024 to 10,668k at 30 June 2026, with video revenue down 7.8% in Q2 2026. Residential Connectivity & Platforms adjusted EBITDA margin compressed 160 basis points year on year to 37.7%.
• Debt load and its allocation between two companies: Total debt of $90,381m against $7,661m of cash leaves net debt of roughly $82,720m, approximately 2.4 times trailing adjusted EBITDA and around 86% of the entire equity market capitalisation. How that debt is split in the separation is a live risk to both entities' credit ratings.
• Separation execution and tax risk: Comcast has disclosed the risk of significant tax liability if the Versant separation fails to qualify as tax-free, and in February 2026 warned of a potential tax charge despite a non-taxable opinion. The NBCUniversal and Sky spin adds regulatory approval, financing, stranded-cost and dis-synergy risk over roughly a year.
• Content cost inflation against fragmenting audiences: The eleven-year NBA and WNBA agreement worth roughly $27bn is now a fixed annual cost of approximately $2.5bn. Peacock lost $552m of EBITDA in Q4 2025 and $432m in Q1 2026 before turning profitable in a quarter that carried FIFA World Cup revenue.
• Goodwill and intangible carrying values: The balance sheet carries $53.1bn of goodwill and $59.4bn of franchise rights against a market capitalisation of $95.9bn. Comcast wrote off $8,583m in 2022, $155m in FY2025 and a further $171m in Q1 2026, so the precedent for further impairment exists.
• Reduced capital returns: The buyback was paused on 29 June 2026 and the dividend held flat in January 2026, removing the two supports that had underpinned per-share growth.

11. Recent Developments

• 02 Jan 2026 — Versant Media Group spin-off completed. Comcast distributed one Versant share for every 25 Comcast shares in a tax-free separation covering CNBC, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Fandango; Versant began trading on Nasdaq as VSNT on 5 January 2026, and Comcast transferred $750m of net cash to it during Q1 2026.
• 29 Jan 2026 — FY2025 results and a frozen dividend. Comcast reported record full-year free cash flow of $19,235m and adjusted EPS of $4.31, and simultaneously held the annualised dividend at $1.32 per share, ending a run of seventeen consecutive annual increases.
• 23 Apr 2026 — Q1 2026 delivers record wireless adds on an Olympic quarter. The Milan Cortina Winter Olympics reached 225 million Americans and Super Bowl LX averaged 125 million viewers, NBCUniversal's most-watched programme ever, while wireless net adds hit a then-record 435,000 and broadband losses narrowed by 117,000 year on year.
• 31 May 2026 — Sale of Sky's German operations completed. Comcast now presents its results pro forma for both the Versant separation and the Germany disposal.
• 29 Jun 2026 — Comcast announces it will split into two public companies. The board approved an intention to spin off NBCUniversal and Sky tax-free in approximately one year, retaining up to 19.9% for up to a year, with Michael Cavanagh to lead NBCUniversal and Michael Angelakis to lead Comcast; the share buyback was paused the same day and the shares rose more than 20% pre-market.
• 01 Jul 2026 — Universal Kids Resort opened in Frisco, Texas. Comcast's first theme park designed specifically for families with young children began trading, following Epic Universe's opening in Orlando in May 2025.
• 07 Jul 2026 — Sky agreed to acquire ITV Media & Entertainment. The deal, worth up to £1.6bn including £1.2bn of cash, Love Productions and an earn-out, brings the ITV channels and ITVX under Sky, with ITV Studios to be spun off as a separately listed company.
• 23 Jul 2026 — Q2 2026 results show Peacock's first profitable quarter. Peacock delivered positive adjusted EBITDA of $189m on 48 million subscribers, domestic wireless lines crossed 10 million with a record 448,000 net adds, and free cash flow rose 2.3% to $4,604m, though management flagged near-term softness in theme parks.
• 18 Aug 2026 — Peacock raised prices across every tier. Ahead of the NFL season the Select plan moved to $8.99 a month from $7.99 and Premium to $12.99 from $10.99, with increases of $1 to $3 depending on tier.

12. Key Dates to Watch

• Expected Oct 2026 — Q3 2026 results. Third-party earnings calendars point to 29 October 2026, consistent with Comcast reporting Q3 2025 on 30 October 2025, but the company had not issued its own conference-call announcement as at 25 August 2026.
• 07 Oct 2026 — Expected ex-dividend date for the fourth-quarter 2026 dividend of $0.33 per share.
• 28 Oct 2026 — Expected payment date for the fourth-quarter 2026 dividend of $0.33 per share.
• Expected Jan 2027 — Q4 and full-year 2026 results, together with the board's decision on the 2027 dividend rate after holding it flat for 2026.
• Expected Jun 2027 — Targeted completion of the NBCUniversal and Sky spin-off, described on 29 June 2026 as "in approximately one year" and subject to final board approval, tax opinions, regulatory clearance and financing.
• TBC — Completion of Sky's acquisition of ITV Media & Entertainment, subject to UK regulatory clearance; no completion date has been published.
• TBC — Resumption of the share repurchase programme, paused on 29 June 2026 with no restart date given.

Universal United Kingdom Resort near Bedford is targeted to open in 2031, with construction beginning during 2026. The NFL season starting in September 2026 is the principal driver of Media revenue through the second half. Scheduled macroeconomic releases that move the wider market are listed on the ChartsView economic calendar, and readers can discuss this research in the ChartsView forum.

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