Clear Channel Outdoor’s expense cuts are done in the US and Latin America but have yet to be completed in Europe. And don’t expect to see asset sales until 2022 at least. Here’s what else Clear Channel Outdoor CEO William Eccleshare, Americas CEO Scott Wells, and CFO Brian Coleman said at this week’s Deutsche Bank Conference.
Eccleshare on Lessons of last year.
This sector, out of home, is remarkably resilient. The ability it had to bounce back from a really challenging set of circumstances has been…even more dramatic than we expected…in those early weeks the number of people who said to me…out of home, nobody is out of home, so what’s that going to do to your business…What actually happened was that even with very significant constraints on movement the business actually continued to deliver revenue…As the restraints were lifted…advertisers came back…
Eccleshare on Focus for 12-18 months
The first key focus for us is getting the business back into growth…we’re confident that we can get into that in Q2…Making the case again for out of home and why out of home is such a powerful medium is important…the then other key parts are…our digital conversion strategy…continuing to invest in data and data analytics…that we continue our programmatic investments…those are core strategic initiatives for us.
Wells on the US Digital Billboards
Right now about a third of our revenues are digital and that’s on less than 5% of our assets so we’ve converted really good locations…we’ve gotten a lot better at monetizing the digital assets…
Wells on The airport pricing challenge.
Your going to see advertisers trying to lock in positions while we’re willing to do attractive rates. And so the real art over…the next 12-18 months is going to be striking the right balance of bringing people back to the category while making sure that our pricing is escalating as the traffic escalates.
Coleman on Permanent Expense Savings
These would involve permanent severance and other initiatives…restructuring in the Americas is largely complete and is expected to save $7 million per year beginning in 2021. We’ve also had corporate restructuring that we expected to save $5 million on an annual run rate. That is largely complete. We’ve completed our costs reductions in Latin America…where we need a little more time is in our European segment and that’s largely a function of multiple countries, multiple jurisdictions…we do expect the restructuring to be completed in the back half of 2021 or 2022.
Eccleshare says don’t expect Clear Channel Outdoor assets sale in 2021.
At the moment the bid-ask is too wide. I’m not seeing a lot of activity. None at all in Europe and not a lot in the US…I would say your going to be talking towards the end of this year before you see a significant change in that gap.
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