The 66-year old multi-millionaire Tom Rutledge is currently the Chairman and CEO of Charter Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: CHTR) after serving as president of the company for 4 years. He owns around 380K+ shares of CHTR stock, and as of November 2020, his estimated net worth amounted to $281 million. Rutledge’s past experiences include serving as a President of Time Warner Cable and as COO of Cablevision. As of today, while holding the highest post in CHTR, Tom Rutledge is also the present Chairman of the Board of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and is part of the boards of both CableLabs and C-SPAN. In a CNBC interview, Rutledge explained and elaborated his company’s Q4 2020 results and provided some updates about how they are doing in Charter Communications.
Here is what Tom Rutledge has to say about CHTR’s Q4 2020 earnings and outlook:
“Obviously, 2020 was a very unusual year. People changed their habits and we actually had the biggest growth year in our history in 2020 with 2.2 million broadband editions. So it was a significant growth year but the growth came in an unusual fashion. A lot of people connected with our remote education opportunity fund– a lot of anomalies occurred but we actually think growth will continue on its path, kind of what its like the prior year in 2019, an accelerating growth that we’ve had from prior years since we put the company together in 2016. We actually expect 2021 to be more similar to what 2019 was but actually accelerating.
We’ve actually generated most of our revenue through subscriber growth and we believe that’s the kind of business model we would like to run and we think it’s more activity, but we have done some things to make our growth easier like self installations. About 80% of our customers now are able to self-install when we do the connection. So we’ve taken out friction in growth itself to drive most of our revenue growth.
We actually grew video for the year last year. I think we’re the only company in the country that did so and the reason we did is because our broadband growth was so good. The reason our broadband growth was good is because we have great pricing, and great packaging, and great products, and that broadband growth pulled through a lot of video growth but the trends in video are still what they were prior to last year. Multi-channel video growth is slowing because it’s expensive. There are alternatives in terms of direct-to-consumer.
We still think there is a big opportunity in video, and we’re growing smaller packages as well in some cases, and we’re providing new products transactionally for customers in an IP format that we think gives us an opportunity to continue to serve customers with a full video product for the foreseeable future.”
