Anatel, the telecom regulator in Brazil, posted total industry wireless subscribers for the month of September that were substantially higher than our estimates and which could lead to several hundred thousand subscriber upside to the Q3 reports of TIM Part, Vivo and America Movil’s Claro. These estimates are sometimes slightly revised when the final numbers…
The heart of the Discovery brand is exploration, learning and knowledge – all of which appear to logically fit with Discovery’s acquisition of HowStuffWorks.com. Simply go to Google search (or Yahoo search) and type in “How Robots Work,” “How Trains Work” or even “How Soccer Works” – all of these yield howstuffworks.com as the top…
We first downgraded MCCC to SELL (at $8.04) in January 2007 in the midst of the Sinclair Broadcasting retransmission battle, as we suspected the battle would have a greater impact on full-year earnings than investors expected. We gave up on our short thesis in mid-June as investors appeared more focused on the upside from a…
Telemar once again failed in its attempt to restructure its shares with a deal that implied lower value to the Preferred shareholders than the Ordinary shareholders. Its tender for the Preferred shares in cash failed possibly because the offer still reflected a 30% discount to the value of Ordinary shareholders. As a result the company…
America Movil announced a special dividend after the close that equates to $1.85 per share or a dividend yield of 2.85% based on today’s close. The dividend is payable on November 6th. That is a $3.3 billion dollar payout versus the $1.0 billion special dividend that they made at the end of 2005. While we…
Virgin Mobile is expected to price an IPO today that will raise the company over $200 million to reduce its debt and operate its business. Sprint and Best Buy will be cashing out of their share in the business. While the management team has done an incredible job over the past 5 years in growing…
Yesterday, Oxygen Media was sold for $925 mm (supposedly, $875 mm after other financial assets are factored in) to GE’s NBC Universal (click here for release). The $12/sub value (74 mm subs) equates to an EBITDA multiple of 22x, based on an estimated $40 mm of EBITDA in 2007. NBC believes it can achieve upwards…
Reduced 2007 guidance and yet another quarter of weak results will likely have a negative impact on the consensus 2008 EBITDA estimate of $12.2 billion but we believe it needs to fall by $1.5 billion or more before the stock can bottom. Sprint’s pre-announcement of a 337,000 decline in post paid customers in Q3 did…
The Discovery retail stores hurt Discovery’s profitability not only because they (always) lost money, but because Discovery’s prior management team pushed all Discovery merchandise through the Discovery stores; in turn, Discovery was not able to generate high-margin licensing revenues. With the Discovery stores now shuttered, Discovery’s management is aggressively looking to sign licensing deals that…
We believe that it is already too late for a management change to enable the company to meet 2008 consensus EBITDA estimates and would expect any new CEO to lower 2008 guidance substantially. A new CEO at Sprint would likely want to set the expectations bar low in order to regain the credibility of the…
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