The Murdoch Family Trust was amended in early 2007 to include all six children of Rupert Murdoch, whereas the trust had previously covered only the four children from his first two marriages. The expansion of the number of beneficiaries of the trust essentially knocked down the value owned by the original four beneficiaries by $700…
Writers are worried about capturing their fair share of income in a new digital world, yet no one (including themselves) can actually define what that digital world will look like. At the same time, the studios (producers) are likely starting to get quite excited at the prospect of using Force Majeure to terminate unprofitable development…
We are sitting at the Live Nation analyst meeting in NYC and believe the most immediate takeaway is that LYV management has its strategic “cross-hairs” directly focused on the record labels. Paraphrasing LYV’s Michael Cohl, “we are the record labels worst enemy.” The comment was made after he highlighted that record label margins are low-mid…
We recently had an opportunity to meet with senior management at NII Holdings. Management indicated that its target debt to EBITDA leverage ratio is 3.0x, which is substantially higher than its current lack of leverage and we believe enables a significant share repurchase over the next few years. 2x leverage on our 2008 EBITDA estimate…
We believe Sprint’s target launch of QChat has been pushed out to the second quarter of 2008 from Q1 and will only occur in a handful of markets because of the need for further network development. This could delay a national launch until H2-2008. This would be another critical miscue in the Nextel integration as…
Q4 ’07 CD trends are increasingly concerning and we now believe retail floor space is likely to shrink at a faster pace than we originally expected when we downgraded WMG to SELL from NEUTRAL on November 1st. In addition, we are increasingly concerned with the sustainability of WMG’s music publishing profits in 2008/2009. We had…
We upgraded Clearwire’s stock today to Neutral from Sell based on the drop following weak Q3 results and termination of the Sprint transaction. Clearwire reported uninspiring Q3 results this morning with net subscriber additions of 49,000 that were 6,000 lower than our estimate of 55,000 that was recently revised down from 65,000. We believe the…
There was nothing remarkable in T-Mobile USA’s Q3 results. (Click here for the table that compares results to our estimates.) As normal, T-Mobile’s subscriber growth of 857,000 net additions trailed the industry leaders AT&T and Verizon which posted 2.0 million and 1.6 million, respectively. Its churn remained high at 2.9% (versus 1.3% for VZ and 1.7% for T) because of…
While shareholders rejected the Dolan family $36.26 offer to take CVC private (now 37% above the current share price), we do not believe Chuck and Jim Dolan are going to “sit on their hands” and watch cash buildup at the company. We believe that CVC can generate over $540 million of free cash flow in…
TIM Participações posted Q3 results which included a one time charge to bad debt to write off uncollected receivables discovered during the implementation of a new credit and collection system. Apparently they forgot to charge post paid customers who bought their phones on a payment schedule over the past three years. Ironically bad debt, excluding…
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