We have been a long-time subscriber to the AOL beta program, going all the way back to when AOL only had a walled-garden, downloadable client. With AOL’s business focus shift a couple of years ago to free (via AOL.com) and third-party ad networks (advertising.com), we were quite surprised to see an e-mail yesterday from AOL…
The pressure across Disney’s travel-related businesses is growing, with Disney Cruise Lines the latest to offer significant discounts. Disney Cruise Lines (DCL) has just announced a kids cruise free promotion, targeted at families cruising with children under the age of 12 (which we presume is their core demo). Click here to see the promotion on Disney’s…
Dreamworks Animation is set to debut Shrek the Musical this coming Sunday, December 14th (after a month of Broadway previews). The musical will be shown to analysts this Thursday night and is likely to be a major topic of discussion at Thursday’s DWA analyst meeting in NYC (with clarity provided as to the potential upside…
While DIS has long traded at premium earnings and FCF multiples to its large cap media peers (such as VIA/B and NWS/A, both remain BUY rated), its valuation gap has meaningfully widened over the past month to a level that we cannot ignore. We are downgrading the stock to NEUTRAL from BUY and removing our…
In July 2008 (click here for our blog post), we indicated that our expectation of accelerating declines in consumer spending (retail & rental) on home entertainment following 2007’s 2% decline was incorrect, following a 1H 2008 increase of almost 2%. At the time, we raised our full-year 2008 DVD spending estimate to flat from down…
Following Walt Disney World’s November 6th announcement of a 7 night for the price of 4 promotion (hotels and tickets included, see our 11/6 blog on the subject, Click here ), WDW is now offering aggressive room-only discounts (average discount is 35%) for most mid-week dates between January and March 2009 (specifically, 1/4/09-1/15/09, 1/19/09-2/12/09 and…
We expect Sprint to announce a significant workforce reduction in January in order to more quickly adjust its bloated cost structure. This will likely result in a charge to Q1 results but we believe it will better position the company to exceed what we believe are overly dire 2009 and 2010 EBITDA estimates by our…
Investors have been attracted to cable stocks in the past few months, specifically the large cap names (Comcast and Time Warner Cable), based on the perceived security of a largely subscription-based business model (advertising only comprises a high-single digit percentage of total cable revenues). Yet, with Comcast and Time Warner Cable down only 12% and…
We are reducing our estimates and price target for NII Holdings primarily because of the sustained decline of the Mexican Peso and Brazilian Real versus the US Dollar. We previously revised our currency estimates on October 3rd but Latin American currencies continued to weaken significantly against the dollar. Click here for a copy of our…
National Amusements (NAI) continues to work on a restructuring of its $1.6 bn in debt outstanding. Based on current market values, we believe the liquid assets of NAI are $1.8 bn plus an estimated $500 mm of value for its illiquid movie theater assets. According to the LA Times (click here), NAI is hoping to…
You must be logged in to post a comment.