In an interview with Fortune, Comcast (CMCSA) CEO Brian Roberts said that the growth of new products for the company has had its second-largest increase in company history.
He said this in response to a question about investors' concerns about the growing competition in the industry.
Roberts said last year the company grew new products by 100 percent, and this year they're on a 30 percent growth clip. Roberts added that for every customer they lost in cable, they've added ten more in telephone.
Some of the major problems the company faces, according to Roberts, are "heightened competition, the potential softness in the economy, and the maturation of broadband."
Growth for the company will continue he said, albeit slower growth.
Even so, he said the rate should still excite investors, as telephone services for business, growing digital subscriptions and broadband together should provide solid growth in the years ahead.
The reason the company has become out of favor with investors overall, is their former predictability has eroded, and the new products are impossible to project, as far as how they'll impact the bottom line of the company, in spite of Roberts' hopes.
That's not to say those hopes won't become a reality, it's just not able to be counted on like past cable subscriptions were.
Another aspect about competition, was that in Roberts view, it will make them a better company, as they respond to ways to be better than their competitors. That's a legitimate response, as competition in the marketplace is the driving force behind making products, services and thus companies better.
One thing for sure, Comcast's growth will increasingly come from outside of their cable TV subscriptions. A strong place they are positioned for is in the changing Internet video space, which will make it tougher for phone companies to compete as DSL just can't serve it up at near the quality that faster cable broadband can.
There's also the new technology DOCSIS 3.0 (high speed modem), which Roberts says should roll out sometime in 2008. That will offer speed of up to 160 megabits or more per second. That could be a solid growth area as the Internet continues to expand in the rich media content area.
In response to their terrible customer service reputation, Roberts also said they've already responded in a big way to it, by adding an additional 11,000 customer service and technical workers, and also implementing a program where they call customers before and after visits to monitor quality.
I think Comcast will be a good company for some time, assuming they're really able to improve their customer service over long period of time.
What competition has done, is make the company much harder to understand in the future. Their former foundation built on cable subscription has for the most part matured. Because they're dependent on new products and services for growth, there's no way to project accurately where they will be in the years ahead; something that could be counted on while they continued to growth their cable service.
That's the difference in they type of company they were and the type of company they might be, as far as it relates to investors.
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