Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings CFO Brian Coleman and Clear Channel Outdoor Americas CFO David Sailer appeared at last week’s Deutsche Bank Leveraged Finance conference.  Some of their comments.

A sale of France and Spain is in the works but there are hurdles

We have started to get some traction in a number of areas…we’ve actually executed sales transactions on both Switzerland and and our Italian markets. We are under contract to sell Spain, it is currently going through a regulatory review…and we’ve announced…our French market that is currently going through a…workers council process …Spain a great market… we’ve had a lot of good contract wins.  It’s an attractive market but but the purchaser is a strategic and operates in that country so there’s a regulatory review process that’s going to take a while… France is a little different.  The buyer doesn’t have that strategic regulatory concern …but in France you go through workers council process.  They get a chance to review and opine on the transaction.

Expect $30 million in corporate overhead cuts following the sale of the European assets.

If we were to fully execute on the sale of our European assets we would expect to save at least $30 million a year in corporate spending… but…it doesn’t happen right away…I think the real cost savings happens after you’ve exited a market…

Reluctant to sell US assets

No doors are closed… we want to keep an open mind.  We want to consider everything, but we also want to be very thoughtful about the sequencing of activities that that we do and ultimately how that impacts…shareholder value…it’s completely natural to say hey you’ve got these US assets and they’re very valuable why didn’t you sell some of them…you must consider the tax consequences… because we have a very low basis across our our US assets and on an after tax basis it may not be as deleveraging as you think…you also have to look at the platform that we have and…what do you sell that gets you the deleveraging but doesn’t negatively impact the platform and the investments that we’ve been making…if you were to damage the platform by selling US assets that’s certainly something you have so I think the right thing to do is to continue to push hard on the international front and continue to focus on growing the US business…

The US Ad environment

It’s been a challenging year… it felt like a stumble out of the gates to start the year followed by some improvement leading up to June and then once again some softness going into the third quarter…

Digital conversions

We’re going to look to put…110 digitals this year…there’s plenty of opportunity from a conversion standpoint but also many of our markets we’re still building organically and there’s definitely room and opportunity in the marketplace

When the $26 million SEC fine relating to Clear Channel China is due

I think we do half of it in Q4 this year the other half I think Q3 of next year.

Billboard Insider’s take:  There’s no way to evaluate claims that a sale of US assets will not deleverage short of seeing more info.  We hope Clear Channel’s board is reviewing this and not taking management’s word for it.  We have no patience with the argument that selling will “negatively impact the platform”.  “The platform” has generated a cumulative 78% negative return since Clear Channel Outdoor spun off from Clear Channel in May 2019.

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