Cable

摘要

Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Cablevision's fourth quarter results. Sales dropped 2.2 percentnfrom a year earlier to $1.5 billion, in part because of the storm's effects, it said. It gave out $33.2 millionnin credits to customers during the quarter and spent nearly $110 million on repairs and operations relatednto the storm. The storm also pushed back work on some of the company's other capital projects bynabout two months, Chairman James Dolan said during the company's Q3 earnings call Thursday. Thencompany's labs were under water during the storm and unusable for about three weeks, Chief Marketing Officer Kristin Dolan said. And December had passed before Cablevision "really got back to working" onnnew initiatives, James Dolan said. "From the storm through the end of the year, we lost that time," hensaid. The storm hurt Cablevision results more sharply than analysts had expected, Wells Fargo analystnMarci Ryvicker wrote in a note to investors. The company lost 65,000 customer accounts during the quarter,nwhen Ryvicker had estimated it would add 18,000. It lost 50,000 basic video subscribers, far morenthan the 12,000 average analysts expected, she wrote. Profit nearly doubled from a year earlier on a lowernloss associated with paying off debt, it said. Its shares fell 9.5 percent to $14.00.