By Michael Bennett
There’s trouble in Radio City!
WIP’s new corporate owner, suburban Philly’s Entercom’s stock price has plummeted, have plummeted as much as 24% in the past few days, closing yesterday at $7.65, down from $11 on Tuesday.
The reason?
People are turning off idiots talking about sports they know nothing about.
The stock’s decline follows the company’s first-quarter earnings release, which featured worse-than-expected revenue and adjusted earnings per share as the company’s net revenue for the quarter fell about 7% year over year on a same-station basis.
For its first quarter, Entercom Communications reported revenue of $300.6 million and a net loss per share of $0.10. Non-GAAP earnings per share were at about breakeven. On average, analysts were expecting revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share of $317 million and $0.08.
While results were worse than expected, Entercom CEO David Field gave investors an upbeat update on the company’s merger with CBS Radio, which closed last November.
[W]e have moved quickly to implement rapid change and have made good progress on our various integration, synergy and transformation goals. We have built a terrific leadership team and are driving strong ratings growth and launching a number of revenue-driving initiatives to capitalize on our scale and compete far more effectively against other media for a larger share of ad spending.
But Field said its first quarter was negatively affected by “soft general local advertising conditions and a number of temporary factors, most notably the exclusion of $12 million in revenue due to financial issues at [United States Traffic Network].”
