At yesterday’s Morgan Stanley conference Lamar CEO Sean Reilly said that Covid cost Lamar three years worth of growth and that the company will make it back in two. Here’s a selection of his comments.
What’s down?
Amusement entertainment and sports runs around 8-9% of our book of business and currently it’s around 4%….Southern California, New York, Las Vegas…The airport business in healthy times contributes about $40 million of business to us. That’s been cut in half…Vancouver, our largest transit market…is going to take a while to recover. Our smaller transit operations are mirroring the billboard business.
Digital Billboard Growth
Late third quarter and early 4th quarter we were seeing a pretty dramatic rebound in our digital footprint…In Q4 our digital billboard billing was greater than our digital billboard billing in the 4th quarter of the prior year.
Who still wants static
…Some of our customers just want static…Apple loves the big iconic units…Cracker Barrel only buys static within a certain radius of their stores…
On the impact of Covid
It basically cost us three years. We basically did last year what we did top and bottom line in 2017. I’m going to get it back in two years.
M&A
Covid has changed the landscape…At $671 million the EBIDTA that Lamar turned in last year that was more than JCDecaux, OUTFRONT and Clear Channel Outdoor combined…we emerge from Covid as one of the strongest players…year in year out we do $150 million of tuck-ins…I don’t think there’s any place that’s off-limits in terms of domestic out of home for Lamar.
On the dividend
We were cautious this year…We’ve got headroom to raise it…If we perform better than plan this year we might have a pleasant surprise in the back half…increasing from $0.75 per share to something north of that…
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