Some of the highlights from OUTFRONT CEO Jeremy Male’s talk at the 51st Annual JP Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference last week.

What’s up and what’s down

Travel was certainly right up there as was legal as well as auto. Health was strong also in Q1. When you drill into it, I think we only really had 2 down categories of any significance. Yes, insurance is still down and sports betting, obviously, this big land grab this time last year as sports betting was legalized in a couple of states.

Private Equity is interested in out of home

So last year was our biggest year of M&A since 2014 at $300 plus million and with one relatively significant purchase of the $180 million range, which was a completely new market for us in Portland, which we love, and that’s going to be a great investment for years to come. We think just based on what’s in the pipe at the moment, there’s going to be lower than that this year…We think there’s probably a little bit of less deal activity this year in terms of tuck-ins.. there’s a lot of interest from the PEs right now. There’s a bunch of rumors about some of the larger, independent players going through processes. So we’ll see

Male would like to see OUTFRONT reduce debt/cashflow from 5 times to 4 times

When we look at the leverage in the business, we typically — we said that, look, we’d prefer to be around 4x. So we’re a turn over that. That doesn’t make us fill in any way nervous. We’ve got great liquidity right now. We don’t have any bond refis until 2025…So yes, look, we’d like it to naturally come down, and it will do over the next 18 months, 2 years.

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