4 Companies That May Benefit From the Rio Olympic Games

May 19, 2016 by Trey Thoelcke

The Olympic Games are just around the corner, less than three months away, and any global concentration of business, entertainment and consumption like the games could lead to gains for companies that are well prepared to meet demand.

Here are four stocks that offer both direct and indirect exposure to the Rio Summer Olympics.

Comcast

NBC, owned and operated by NBC Universal, is a subsidiary of Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ: CMCSA), and it picked up the rights to broadcast the Olympic games for $1.28 billion. NBC will broadcast the event across several platforms, both live and as a prepackaged format.

The broadcaster already has generated more than $1 billion in ad sales, and it has a number of prime time and cable channel inventory slots left to sell.

It also plans to offer streaming coverage on a subscription and ad-based model. NBC broke even in the 2012 Olympics, generating just shy of $41.3 billion off the back of the event, and it generated a small net income on the most recent winter Olympics. Having already chalked up nearly 80% of its outlay in ad sales, expectations are that the company will replicate its Sochi success and pull in a positive bottom line.

This, of course, only addresses the quantifiable benefit. The intangibles that come with exclusive broadcasting (say, for example, the ability to advertise cross network shows to new viewers) could easily outweigh the dollar figure ad sales benefit.