In our 10/22/08 blog post on Disney (Click here), we highlighted several recent data points that suggest that theme park attendance was likely to be pressured in late (calendar) 2008 and throughout 2009. Over the past few days, we have come across a couple of other leisure/travel industry data points which also support the view that Disney’s…
Today’s WSJ (click here) contains an article on the accelerating pace of car dealer closings throughout the US. The article quotes National Automobile Dealer Association stats projecting at least 700 dealerships will close in 2008, up over 60% from 2007 levels. While that represents only 3% of the current base of car dealerships in the…
Cablevision was the first cable operator to offer a $90/month triple play promotion in June 2004 ($29.95 each for video, data and voice). At the time, most including ourselves, considered CVC’s move reckless. Yet, for CVC, the strategy proved incredibly successful, as they were able to grab sizable market share before their competition (VZ FIOS)…
An ABC News internal memo, posted on DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com (click here), highlights just how challenging the network TV biz appears to be heading into 2009 (economy compounding a post-election period for Network news). Unlike cable networks that receive guaranteed license/sub fees, broadcast networks’ revenue is 100% advertising-based and while national advertising is significantly outperforming local advertising (TV…
We lowered our 2009 EBITDA estimate by $3.5 billion to $9.7 billion due to lower wireless usage estimates and revised currency assumptions. Click here for tables that detail our estimate revisions. Our new 2009 EBITDA estimate is $4.4 billion below consensus. The update to our currency assumptions had a $1.5 billion impact on our 2009…
NII Holdings bucked the economic trends and delivered solid Q3 results this morning beating all of our key consolidated metrics of subscribers, churn, ARPU, EBITDA and free cash flow. Click here for a table that details actual results versus our estimates. The highlights include net subscriber additions of 395,000 that matched last quarter and beat…
We believe National Amusements’ (NAI) debt situation is becoming more problematic, as the underlying assets (public equities) continue to decline in value. NAI remains in breach of an asset-to-debt covenant, meaning its banks (led by BofA) could accelerate the maturity of NAI’s $800 mm-plus bank debt at any time. Accelerating the maturity (which could force…
UPDATE…On Friday 10/24, Orlando airport passenger data for September was released and it was ugly; but as expected (as we discussed in our 10/22 blog post below). With seats to/from Orlando down mid-teens starting in September, passengers thru Orlando (including domestic and international) dropped 12.8% in September 2008 Y/Y. The September drop was more than…
We just walked out of the opening keynote presentation at the Hispanic Television summit in NYC, where Time Warner Cable’s EVP and Chief Programming Officer Melinda Witmer presented. Key takeaways: Retrans is very difficult right now. Ms. Witmer opened up the presentation by saying how happy she was to be here today and get away…
While investors continue to view cable companies as defensive, the industry is certainly not immune to the impact of a weakening economy. We believe the combination of rapidly declining local advertising revenues, the risk of consumer service downgrades (to lower monthly expenditures), increasing competition (from FIOS and DBS) and higher programming costs due to difficult…
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