North American billboards are decent, airports is booming and Europe North is recovering and for sale is how you could summarize Clear Channel Outdoor’s 2024 first quarter. Here are the results of the Clear Channel Outdoor 1Q 2024 earnings release, earnings presentation and conference call.
- Consolidated revenue increased 10% to $482 million. North American revenue grew 6%. Airports revenue grew 43%. Europe north revenue grew 8%.
- Management projects that consolidated revenues will grow 3-8% in 2Q 2024 with US billboards up 1-4%, airports up 15-22% and Europe North up 3-10%.
- Adjusted EBIDTA increased by 53% to $97 million due to increased revenue.
- Here are the segment results for Clear Channel Outdoor’s US billboard business. Revenues improved 6% and cashflow increased 17% due to lower site lease expense and lower credit losses.
- At March 31, 2024, Clear Channel Outdoor had $5.6 billion of debt at a weighted average costs of 7.4%. The company refinanced some debt to push out 2025 and 2026 maturities during the first quarter. Leverage is still high with Total Debt/Cashflow(EBIDTA) in excess of 10 times.
CEO Scott Wells says the company is moving ahead with plans to exit Europe North and Latin America
We are in negotiations on the sale of our Europe North segment and we continue to engage with potential counterparties in latam…
CEO Scott Wells responding to a question on the sale of Europe North
…We’ve been real clear that our intention is to become a US focused business…we are in negotiations with with the buyer at this point and I’m not going to go into any more detail on that…
Wells says San Francisco may have bottomed out.
You started having the whole narrative about downtown San Francisco and homelessness and lawlessness and shoplifting and retailers leaving and all those kind of things that kind of came out in late 22 into early 23…the city has done a number of things since then including a number of ballot initiatives…increasing policing and and working to…get get streets cleaned up…it is not anywhere near its full potential right now but it is you know it’s back to growing and…it’s moving in the right direction…but I think it’s going to be a little while still till national advertisers decide that they that they want to weigh in…
Billboard Insider’s take: A decent quarter for Clear Channel Outdoor. North America billboards is doing well. Airports is booming. Europe North is recovering. Nice to see that the company is in talks to sell the remaining international operations. Clear Channel Outdoor finished the day up 2.9% while the S&P 500 grew 0.4%, OUTFRONT grew 1.9% and Lamar grew 1.4%.
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