Clear Channel Outdoor CEO Scott Wells and CFO Brian Coleman appeared last week at the Cit 2023 Technology Conference.  Here are the highlights.

Wells says European asset sales won’t reduce leverage

We would love for these to be deleveraging transactions but when you have a debt multiple like we do and you look at what European assets trade for the odds of it being a deleveraging transaction are pretty long so we’ve been pretty clear I think in all of our communication on this that this is a truly strategic move to simplify the footprint, simplify the overhead as opposed to something that’s going to lead to deleveraging but it’s an important first step to being able to to then focus our energy on really optimizing the US

Business services, travel and amusements doing well

We’re seeing good strength in business services. That’s probably our most robust local market and that that covers everything from you know copy centers to like lawyers with lawyers probably being one of the really strong growth areas. We’ve seen good growth in pharma it’s a small vertical for us but that’s an exciting area that we think has a lot of potential in that we’ve done a lot of the leg work to unlock that category with our data and analytics. We’ve seen very good growth in travel-oriented verticals…amusements hotels restaurants

Tech and Insurance are down

Technology – that’s been softer. Auto insurance has not bounced back.  We complained a lot about auto insurance in 2022. It was our weak vertical all year…we had some reason to think that we would see some pickup this year and it has not…

Billboard Insider’s take:

This slide (part of Clear Channel Outdoor’s presentation) gives the rationale for getting rid of all of Europe at any price.  Europe North and South accounts for 42% of Clear Channel Outdoor’s corporate revenue and only 17% of Clear Channel Outdoor’s EBIDTA.  Add in regulatory barriers to doing anything (think lengthy  reviews of acquisitions and divestitures and workers councils in France) and there’s nothing but upside to offloading Europe to focus on the US.

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