Outfront Media CEO Jeremy Male was upbeat on this week’s earnings conference call He expects Outfront’s revenue growth to accelerate above the first quarter’s 10% rate. You can read a transcript of his comments at Seeking Alpha.
Outfront’s 10% growth rate is propelled by local advertising but national is trending
Local was up 12% and drove most of our growth and once again, it’s worth noting that this is the highest local growth rate we’ve ever experienced. National was up 4.9% which was a good start to 2019. And we’re currently seeing very positive trends in national advertising, particularly in transit.
Revenue will continue to increase.
At this point in time, we expect total revenue growth to accelerate and approach the early teens with both billboard and transit growth rates increasing further from our first quarter rate. I’m sure you appreciate that this is the highest revenue guidance we’ve given is as a public company.
On Direct to Consumer Companies using out of home.
I think what we have seen is a number of these DTC brands as I call direct-to-consumer brands are really strong with us particularly in these urban environments particularly on transit. So brands like Casper literally built their business on our medium. And we believe that these kind of sort of pre-IPO brands are actually really benefiting in terms of getting their brand out at relatively low CPM. One of the sort of great strengths of out of home.
Outfront CFO Matt Siegal discussed how the company is using at the market (ATM) equity offering to manage leverage.
Our leverage ratio was unchanged of 4.7 times and our next debt maturity is not until 2022. An additional source of liquidity is our at the market or ATM equity program. During the first quarter, we used the ATM facility from gross proceeds of $70 million, which we used to partially fund an attractive billboard acquisition in California, primarily in the San Francisco Bay area. As of March 31st, we have $267.5 million of capacity remaining on the ATM.
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