Altice USA’s share price on Wall Street is down more than 55% so far this year — including nearly 5% on Tuesday. And the cable operator has lost nearly 87,000 home broadband customers through the first three quarters of 2023 as T-Mobile and Verizon have jointly added around 2.7 million fixed wireless access subscribers.
But speaking at a UBS TMT conference Monday, Altice’s (relatively) new CEO, Dennis Mathew, said his struggling cable company is beginning to compete more effectively against FWA for customers.
“Fixed wireless remains a competitor across our footprint wherever it’s available,” Mathew said. “Availability is really tied to the capacity they have on the network, but they market broadly and then they have to adjust based on where the sales are happening. ”
Mathew said Altice USA experienced a 4% improvement in ”win share“ — a term borrowed from baseball sabermetrics to describe progress in head-to-head competition — against FWA opponents. The improvement, he said, is coming not through upgrades of Altice’s fiber or DOCSIS 3.1 offerings — products he remains “bullish” on as they are — but from better ”execution“ of sales strategy.
“I think that’s due to two things,” he added. “One is just stronger sales channel performance. As I mentioned, we’ve brought in new sales channel leaders — a new leader of inbound sales, a new leader of direct sales and a new leader of [business-to-business]. Across the board, we’re seeing better performance management. On B-to-B, we're seeing a stronger sales culture, which is yielding a better conversion and better productivity. And then we're going on the offensive a bit in our marketing, as well. We have a story to tell fixed solutions vs. fixed wireless — we have a great product and great value. And that’s helping us make progress.”
Mathew said that more than 60 new VP-and-above-level executives have been hired since he took over for Dexter Goei in September 2022.
He described Altice USA as still being in the “early innings” of an overall turnaround that he believes will boil down to just simple business execution across channels.
“Fourteen months later, we have vastly more capabilities,” Mathew said. “To be able to drive or more effectively go to market. To be able to deliver higher quality. To be able to manage our base more effectively. But yes, there is more work to do.”
