Charter Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHTR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Christopher Winfrey : I think I’ll let Jessica comment. It’s still dramatically — well, it’s still much lower than it was pre-pandemic, and the churn is low. Bad debt has been slowly building back up. It’s nowhere near back to where it was, but it has an impact on a year-over-year basis. In January, we typically don’t talk to intra-quarter, we don’t like to. But we’re starting to see, and that may be the bridge between what some of our peers and competitors are saying. It’s not dramatic, but we have seen a step up both in non-pay as well as bad debt. And I think that just reflects the overall economy. In some sense, you look at that and the upfront impact of that is negative. You don’t like it. On the other hand, it’s one of the indicators that the market is starting to normalize in terms of transaction volumes, you have a delay from when the bad news comes in and when the selling opportunity arises. So it’s a double-edged sword.

Jessica Fischer : Yes. The other piece I would remind you we’ve talked about before, we’re a big participant in ACP and a big proponent of that program. I think for our customers that are more prone to non-pay. We’ve endeavored to make sure that they recognize that, that program is available to them and to be part of the solution they’re making Internet affordable for them. It has two impacts. One is that those customers don’t churn as much as before. The other impact, though, is that on some of those customers that convert into the ACP program. We might be carrying a balance related to those customers that then ends up sort of flushing through in our bad debt computation. So while bad debt is higher on a numerical value basis, it’s not necessarily connecting into a non-pay churn where we’ve converted the customer to being an ACP customer.

Stefan Anninger: Thanks, Ben. Operator, that concludes our call.

Christopher Winfrey : Thank you, everyone.

Jessica Fischer: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today’s conference call, and we appreciate your participation. You may disconnect at any time.