NEC
The Nine numbers are really quite good.
Traditional media isn’t dead, and the digital presence is growing without cannibalizing all else (e.g. as a bottomless pit to hurl capex into).
For the Core Portfolio we are quite interested to buy it. The challenge is what to sell to fund it. The banks and the insurance companies make up ~1/3rd of the portfolio, however, they have a tremendous rates tailwind.
The NIM’s go up as mortgage rates go higher, which leads to a lower share of wallet for everyone else, which means consumption goes down, which means advertising budgets get cut.
The traditional media companies have lots and lots of operating leverage; programming costs are largely fixed, so margins get crunched when ads come off, and from management commentary, the visibility across the book isn’t great at the best of times.
It looks very cheap, is managing the digital transition from FTA and radio well, but a) that’s no easy journey, execution risk is high, and b) revenues are very cyclical, and we’ve got good reason to be concerned about the cycle, although c) it has a good balance sheet.
So, it’s something we’ll debate.
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