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(AP) - Time Warner Cable Inc., the nation's second biggest cable TV operator, said Thursday its profit fell 11 percent in the third quarter, weighed down by heftier interest expenses after piling on debt to separate from its parent, Time Warner Inc.
Higher video programming and employee costs also hurt earnings, but the cable company said its revenue rose 4 percent in part due to price increases.
Time Warner Cable added 117,000 new lines of service encompassing video, Internet and phone services from the second quarter. That's less than the 522,000 it added sequentially in the third quarter of 2008. The company, based in New York, serves 14.6 million customers.
Time Warner Cable said it earned $268 million, or 76 cents per share, in the three months ended Sept. 30 compared with $301 million, or 92 cents a share, a year ago.
Operating income rose by 5 percent to $828 million.
Revenue rose to $4.5 billion from $4.34 billion a year earlier.
Earnings were a penny a share shy of analysts' average estimate but revenue topped their forecast of $4.47 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
The company's net debt increased by 75 percent to $22 billion after paying a $10.9 million special dividend to Time Warner Inc. and other shareholders in March.
Free cash flow, a critical measure of liquidity for typically debt-laden cable companies, was affected by the higher debt load. It rose by 19 percent to $1.5 billion compared with an increase of 64 percent in last year's third quarter, when it had $13 billion of net debt.
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