Will Historic Consumer Spending Patterns Hold Up?

Long-term interest rates are quietly heading higher, and consumer confidence is headed lower, economists and financial analysts now say. Rising rates are a drag on the economy, making it more difficult for businesses and households to finance spending and investment.

This is going to slow the economic recovery and challenge my thesis that communications and multi-channel video entertainment businesses suffer slower growth, but still grow, even in recessionary times.

Just to recap, over the last 25 years, in every recession, telecom and cable TV revenues, for example, have grown, year over year. Growth rates slowed, but were never in negative ranges, overall.

That does not mean consumers were not economizing, they likely were. But overall spending on what have come to be viewed as essential services has not faltered in any recession over the last 25 years.

What tends to happen in a recession is that consumers stop buying incremental or enhanced features and products. That can take the form of less spending on premium TV, pay-per-view and on-demand content; delaying the purchase of a new mobile phone or switching to a prepaid account.

Consumers also typically shift spending away from other activities in recessionary times, propping up core communications and video entertainment services.

There has been pressure of other sorts, though. Firms including Verizon and Time Warner Cable mention that housing market distress has lowered new customer acquisition rates. When people are not moving into new houses, or stop renting and move in with relatives, or lose their homes, that reduces new subscriber additions and increases churn.

But there are other structural changes bubbling away underneath. Fixed voice lines mostly have been a case of shifted market share from telcos to cable operators, but also some apparently-growing amount of abandonment in favor of mobile. Roughly the same thing has been happening in the video business, as cable operators slowly lose share to both telco and satellite providers.

Trading market share leaves the overall business about where it was, overall. Over the past decade, though, service providers have benefitted from one truly new product--broadband Internet access--and skyrocketing additional mobile accounts. To the extent voice lines actually are shrinking, not just being shifted to new providers, mobile revenues and broadband have more than compensated for the losses.

In all likelihood, mobile broadband now is going to replace mobile voice as the revenue and growth driver for the next five year period. Assuming there is no change in the underlying rate of mobile substitution, and no sudden replacement of the multi-channel video product by an over-the-top alternative, I would continue to stand by my prediction that, even in the face of sluggishness on the economic front, cable and telco providers will continue to show revenue growth, if slower than they would like.

The real danger comes from some unexpected shift of demand that radically changes spending patterns. That is the sort of thing one cannot anticipate very well, and the reason I spend so much time trying to follow consumer behavior.

related story on growth issues