M&A a 'potential add-on to our strategy,' Charter CEO saysM&A a 'potential add-on to our strategy,' Charter CEO says

Charter Communications President and CEO Chris Winfrey is aware of recent M&A chatter, including speculation about Charter possibly combining with T-Mobile or Comcast. While there are obvious advantages in building scale, M&A is not core to Charter's long-term strategy, he said.

"Our strategy … to create value has never been dependent on M&A," Winfrey said Friday on Charter's Q4 2024 earnings call when asked to comment about the potential of combining with Comcast or otherwise using M&A to get bigger. "In fact, it's really been moving in purely from an organic growth perspective and how do we create value for shareholders from that perspective."

That value can come from areas like saving customers money, providing solid customer service and creating US jobs. "But, by being a good operator that also, I think, opens acquisition opportunities over time," Winfrey said.

He also recognizes that M&A opportunities in cable are limited, as a sizable portion of cable is still family owned or family controlled. Winfrey didn't identify any by name, but Comcast, Cox Communications, Mediacom Communications and Canada's Rogers Communications are among some prime examples.

"This is not like Time Warner Cable, where there's another large publicly traded company out there," he said in reference to Charter's 2016 acquisition of TWC. "So, it's really in the hands of these families or family-controlled businesses who get to decide when's the time that they'd like to combine."

Related:Charter loses 171K broadband subs as it absorbs ACP impact

Winfrey also doesn't buy the notion that a second Trump administration will open up an era of big corporate wheeling and dealing.

"The door for M&A – I think there's a lot of chatter that it's also wide open. I don't think it's wide open," Winfrey said. "I think any M&A transaction that you have to do in any administration, anytime, it has to be good for customers, and has to be good for jobs."

But, bottom line, M&A represents "a potential add-on to our strategy," he said. "It's not the core of our strategy, and it's not the only way that we can create value."

More scale: Nice but not necessary

In the background of this discussion are recent comments made by industry magnate and Charter stakeholder John Malone. He suggested late last year that, from a regulatory standpoint, Charter should be allowed to merge with the likes of Comcast to establish an operator that can take advantage of national reach and scale.

Winfrey said it wouldn't hurt to have more scale.

"We have scale today, and it's sufficient not to say that we're deprived of that, but I think we could do better for customers," Winfrey said. "By having that scale, I think we could save customers additional money. I think we could in-source jobs the way that we did with Time Warner Cable and Bright House and bring more US jobs back from offshore call centers on to onshore environments that create good paying jobs as well as bringing contract labor into in-house as well. So, I think we can be good for ourselves in terms of scale. For consumers, in terms of scale, I think we can be good for jobs."

Related:Who will buy Charter: Comcast or T-Mobile?

Winfrey also believes that more scale could help Charter pursue more projects around AI, which it's already using to assist its customer reps and field techs.

"AI is not cheap," he said. "And the more scale you have for that, to the extent you could become less regional and closer to a national operator to compete, it'll allow you to invest more into AI and to actually have lower cost per customer to do so and to drive additional benefits for customers that way."