Comcast has a new company president — the first outside the founding Roberts family
Mike Cavanagh has been Comcast's chief financial officer since 2015.
Comcast Corp. promoted Mike Cavanagh, a former Wall Street banker, to president of the Philadelphia telecom and entertainment company, the company said Wednesday. He is the first executive outside the Roberts family to hold the title.
Cavanagh’s promotion takes place at a tenuous time for Comcast with its stock price declining considerably over the last year as it looks for new areas of growth and lags in entertainment streaming. The global economy also faces a potential recession.
Comcast shares closed at $28.69 Wednesday, up 0.03%. They peaked in August 2021 at about $60 a share.
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The prices in other telecom and entertainment companies, among them Verizon, Walt Disney and Netflix, have also declined.
Ralph Roberts, one of a troika that founded the cable-TV company in the 1960s (and who died in 2015), and his son, Brian, 62, who is chief executive officer and chairman, were the only prior presidents in the company’s history, Comcast said. Cavanagh, also the company’s chief financial officer, has not been appointed to the board.
Last month, Comcast’s board sought to bolster the company’s stock by purchasing up to $20 billion in shares as investors sold them. Comcast said that it had already repurchased $9 billion worth this year.
Cavanagh said in a statement that he looks “forward to working together to shape the bright future of Comcast.” He was compensated $27.4 million last year.
Comcast, the biggest publicly traded company based in Philadelphia with about 8,000 employees downtown, faces new competition in its bread-and-butter broadband business with wireless competitors offering 5G wireless internet to homes. In recent years, Comcast also has struggled to transition to streaming entertainment from broadcast television and cable-TV formats.
Cavanagh was raised on Long Island in an Irish-Catholic family. He rowed at Yale. In a banking career, Cavanagh rose to the top echelons of JPMorgan as co-CEO of JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank.
JPMorgan came through the financial crisis of 2008-09 mostly unscathed. But a rogue trader in London in 2012 cost JPMorgan about $6 billion and brought regulators down on it.
Cavanagh’s connection to Comcast can be traced through Steve Burke, a longtime Comcast executive and former head of NBCUniversal. Burke sat on the JPMorgan board and knew Cavanagh through board presentations. Burke was also friends with Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive and chairman. Burke and Dimon attended Harvard Business School together, graduating in 1982.
Dimon said in a statement Wednesday that Cavanagh “led complex global businesses at JPMorgan Chase and served as our chief financial officer through the worst parts of the global financial crisis.”