European and Latin American sales are moving along but don’t hold your breath over the sale of Clear Channel Outdoor US assets. Here are the highlights from Clear Channel Outdoor CEO Scott Wells comments at yesterday’s Morgan Stanley Media and Telecom conference.
Out of home better positioned today than 5 years ago
I think we are better positioned than five years ago….First and foremost we’re the last mass visual medium so if you’re looking for maximum reach and particularly maximum reach efficiently we’re it. Linear TV can’t deliver that other than a few events each year…A second thing is data analytics are coming our way. We’ve been getting more sophisticated over the last five years but the capability of the digital space has been constrained by privacy laws… and I think the the last part of it is that we as an industry have gotten better at telling our story we still have a lot of ways to go on this but we have made real progress and I think I think programmatic has actually been a pretty central part of that…
On Clear Channel Outdoor’s recent refinancings
We were real happy with the execution on the the bond and term loan that took out the the 2026…it’s priced, it’s not closed at this point but we came in at at 7 and 7/8% on the bond…
Update on the sale of Europe and Latin America
I think we’re headed in the right direction. We cast a wide net and are talking to a pretty broad array of potential buyers…I can’t go into a lot of detail because we are very much in the process of sorting out, are we looking at kind of a platform sale or are we looking at something less than less than the platform…moving it moving it in in in chunks…
Overhead will be cut $30 million after the sale of Europe and Latin America
what we’ve been talking about directionally is on the order of $30 million… much of that directly in those countries, some of it at the at the corporate center but we you know need to sharpen the pencil…
Don’t expect Clear Channel Outdoor acquisitions
We always are open minded about M&A… but we’re also very realistic about our balance sheet and that doesn’t give us a lot of flexibility to be on the buy side.
US asset sales are hampered by a low tax basis in the assets.
Our tax basis in the US is is pretty low and our leverage level is pretty high and so when you’re in a situation you know unless you could get really really elevated multiples there’s probably not much you can do…
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