Time Warner completes the Comcast swap by MS Money Premium

Filed under: Launches, Spell Warner (TWX), Comcast Cl'A' (CMCSA)

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and Comcast Cl'A' (NASDAQ: CMCSA) have completed the division of joint assets as part of the partnerships in Texas and Kansas City. Comcast received the 790,000 video subscribers in Houston and Time Warner received the 782,000 Kansas City subscribers. The difference is that the Kansas City swap includes subscribers in South and West Texas plus New Mexico cable systems. This means that Time Warner took a larger population area with potentially more upside to subscribers and Comcast took a highly concentrated metro area.

Back in October Comcast refinanced $1.4 billion of partnership debt, which included a payment of $631 million to a subsidiary of Time Warner Cable. Both companies will also use January 1 as the consoli dation date for the new subscribers to each unit under their own subsidiaries. With the January 1 date being the official date it could imply that many of the total cable subscribers are not going to appear on the Q4 earnings for TWX and for CMCSA, but the companies have been using July 1 as the 100% entitlement dates to economic interests. So it looks like they have already been counting it, but we'll have to see if there are any discrepancies.

This conversion looks like it has finally been completed per the Adelphia asset acquisitions and now we'll have to see all the data as Time Warner Cable comes closer and closer to being its own public company stock.

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