Here are excerpts from Outfront CFO Matt Siegel’s comments at last week’s B of A leveraged finance conference sponsored and analyzed by Signvalue.
Siegel would eventually like to renegotiate the MTA contract
We think we can make a good case for renegotiating something mutually beneficial… We like the franchise. We like the audience. We just don’t like the contract.
OUTFRONT is focused on billboard margins
For years we would focus really on getting, winning, building more billboards – adding…opportunities for revenue. We’ve…inflected and we’re focusing a lot more on…the portfolio. We gave up two large contracts, one in New York, one in LA, in the last 15 months.
Pruning the static billboard portfolio.
We’re empowering our real estate team to…negotiate tougher and give up some static leases if they don’t make sense…Right now we have 37,000 static billboards. I don’t think anyone in this room would think less of us if we have 35,000 or 32,000 statics…We’re not giving up any digital. We think more digital is better…
Siegel wants to reduce debt to cashflow to 4.0
We’d still like to reduce our leverage maybe closer to four…to build some financial flexibility…The high yield market is very supportive of out of home…we think having a little less leverage is beneficial to all of our stakeholders.
Something big might happen soon
I do think the industry probably has some strategic changes in the future though people been saying that for years and as one of the three large public companies in the industry we would expect to participate in…If the industry is going to have some strategic moves or have some more consolidation we would look at that…
Digital billboard maintenance spending
We try to spend about 5% of our revenue…$35 million is maintenance capexp…Nothing lasts forever and we have many digitals which have been up 10 years and rather than have the local salespeople and general managers complain we want to… identify those that should be replaced..
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