Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc.
Q3 2017 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 8 Nov 2017

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the 2017 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call for iHeartMedia and Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Incorporated. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we’ll conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the conference over to your host, Eileen Mclaughlin, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Eileen Mclaughlin:]

Good morning and thank you for joining our third quarter 2017 earnings call. On the call today are Rich Bressler, President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer; and Brian Coleman, Senior Vice President and Treasurer. We'll provide an overview of the third quarter of 2017 financial and operating performances of iHeartMedia, Inc., and its subsidiaries, iHeartMedia Capital I, LLC, iHeart Communications, Inc., Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. and Clear Channel International, B.V. For purposes of this call, when we describe the financial and operating performance of iHeartMedia Inc., that also describes the performance of its subsidiaries, iHeartMedia Capital I, LLC, iHeart Communications, Inc., and Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. After an introduction and a review of the quarter, we'll open up the line for questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call includes forward-looking statements. These statements include management's expectations, beliefs and projections about performance and represents management's current beliefs. There can be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs or projections will be achieved or that the actual results will not differ from expectations. Please review the statements of risks contained in our earnings press releases and filings with the SEC. Pacing data will also be mentioned during the call. For those of you not familiar with pacing data, it reflects the orders booked at a specific date versus the comparable date in the prior period and may or may not reflect the actual revenue growth rate at the end of the period. During today's call, we will provide certain performance measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We provided schedules that reconcile these non-GAAP measures with our reported results on a GAAP basis as part of our earnings press releases and the earnings conference call presentation, which can be found on the Investors section of our website, iheartmedia.com and clearchanneloutdoor.com. Please note that our two earnings releases and the slide presentation are available on our website, www.iheartmedia.com and www.clearchanneloutdoor.com, and are integral to our earnings conference call. They provide a detailed breakdown of foreign exchange and non-cash compensation expense items as well as segment revenues, operating income and OIBDAN, among other important information. For that reason, we ask that you view each slide as Rich comments on it. Also, please note that the information provided on this call speaks only to management's views as of today, November 8, and may no longer be accurate at the time of a replay. With that, I will now turn the call over to Rich Bressler.

[Richard Bressler:]

Thank you, Eileen, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for our third quarter earnings conference call. Our consolidated revenues declined in the quarter. However, revenues were flat after adjusting for the sales certain outdoor businesses and the impact of foreign exchange. We generated revenue growth of both the iHeartMedia and International Outdoor segments offset by decline in Americas outdoor. To date, the iHeartMedia segment has delivered 18 consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue growth. Consolidated operating income decline this quarter, due in large part to a one-time expense benefit in 2016 as well as the impact of the sale of certain Outdoor business. Before discussing our third quarter financial performance in detail, let me review with you the fundamentals that drive our businesses and highlight our new initiatives. So first, the recent hurricanes in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, as well as the earthquake in Mexico and wildfires in California affected the communities that we reserve as well as our employees. We are enormously proud of the important work that our teams did in the impacted areas. When people desperately needed help, our people very literally voices for their communities. They slept in their studios and often put their own safety second to there mission of helping your listeners, providing vital information, encouragement and close personal connections and even coordinating life-saving rescues, while the item sales in their family for personally dealing with the devastation. And now they continue to do all they can to help those people on local businesses we cover from these disasters. We expressed our appreciation at our most recent [indiscernible] event; the iHeartRadio Fiesta Latina, where we recognized the communities impacted by disaster and honored the first responders in support of their communities in times of need. Now on to our iHeartMedia segment. iHeartMedia is a national leader not only in radio and audio, but in video overall. We continue to be the undisputed leader in audience reach, for example even with the heavy focus on the top 50 markets by Entercom following their CBS radio acquisition. In those top 50 markets, we still reached 93% of listeners 12 plus and they reached only 67% according to Nielsen. In addition, we are seven times their size in digital reach. iHeartMedia is built on the scale and strength about more than 850 broadcast radio stations and our additional platforms built off that base creating a powerful national network with unparalleled local reach. Last week, we announced our plans to exchange our Richmond and Chattanooga markets for Entercom and CBS Radio Stations in Boston and Seattle, two of the few markets where we did not have a full complement of stations. The exchange will allow us to expand our presence in these strategic markets, further strengthening our position in Boston and Seattle. Our broadcast radio assets alone reached over a quarter billion consumers monthly more than Google and Facebook in the U.S. One of the keys are overall success is our industry best personals who are our listeners loyal and trusty companions as evidenced by the commitment and support they provided their audience is during the recent disasters. Highlighting their continuing bond with their listeners, [the code is ratings] for Bobby Bones, Breakfast Club, Big Boy, Steve Harvey, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh who are all of double-digits compared to the prior year. In addition, Sean Hannity, Bobby Bones and Bill Handel were inducting to the National Radio Hall of Fame last week, and iHeartMedia’s The Bobby Bones show recently won the CMA Award in the National Broadcast Personality of the Year category. With their connections to their listeners, our talent is a powerful influencer network that connects the audiences and build strong engagement relationships that our advertisers and marking partners can use. We are also continuing our transformation into a company fueled by data. The recent earnings reports from the big digital players those very clearly while removing as fast as we can to transform our advertising to be data lead, so offerings more closely resembled both the what and how of traditional digital offerings. With the industry leading data and analytics capabilities of SmartAudio, a product of our groundbreaking Sound Point programmatic platform, we're able to combine the massive scale of our broadcast radio reach with the power of digital data and informed audience targeting. With SmartAudio, we can create the advertising solutions that advertisers expect today and with Sound Point we are changing how our ad inventory is bought and sold. By continually reinventing how we do business with our partners, we are becoming more interracial to today’s digital centric advertising world offering data rich ad buying solutions including attribution there were once available only for digital only products. That said, we believe radio is still undermonetized especially since radio provides a superior ROI for advertisers all as measured by Nielsen with whom we recently signed a multi-year renewal deal for audience measurement and key analytics. However, many advertisers and marketers still view radio as traditional media, so we are continuing to educate them about broadcast radio leadership as Americas number one mass market reach medium reaching 93% of people over 18 years old every week. By comparison, the weekly reach of TV and smartphones is 89% and 83% respectively. Millennials are the toughest demographic groups for advertisers and marketers to engage and radio reaches 92% millennials aged 18 to 34 every week. This reach is greater than smartphones at 90% and TV at 80% and for teens ages 12 to 17 a leading indicator for the future of any product radio's reach is even higher at 95% monthly basically unchanged over the past 40 years, with live TV at 86%. Radio also continues to be the most mobile of mass reach media. About two-thirds of broadcast radio use is out-of-home, while 60% of smartphone use is in the home. With people spending more and more time out-of-home, broadcast radios unmatched out-of-home reach enhances its value as the last point of contact before shopping. In addition to radios enduring engagement reach, new technologies and devices that observing the decline traditional media have instead delivered positive benefits radio, simply put instead of being heard by these new platforms, we've been helped by them and they provide you have more listening to our content, and don't forget that there are 1 billion AM/FM radios in the United States today, compared to just about 240 million smartphones, so broadcast radio still an amazingly strong device platform for us. Beyond our presence across AM/FM, HD digital and satellite radio, television, online, live events, mobile, social media, and iHeartRadio mobile app, we continue to seek at emerging platforms to deliver our content across multiple platforms, including podcast, voice control devices, enhanced auto dashes, wearables, smartphones and gaming consoles. That's why we continue to actively look for partners that can help us extend the iHeartMedia brand to multiple channels. Just last month, we announced that iHeartMedia and Fox TV, a teaming up for a new music competition series called “The Four

[Operator:]

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of David Farber from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

[David Farber:]

Good morning, guys. How are you?

[Richard Bressler:]

Good morning, David.

[David Farber:]

Good morning. I had a couple questions, just first on the topline, it continues to outperform some of the competitors, and we heard you talk about that in the prepared remarks. I guess I would be curious where you're seeing that improvement perhaps you can talk about the digital revenues and the year-over-year performance there that would be helpful and then I had some follow-ups. Thanks.

[Richard Bressler:]

Sure. Appreciate that one. I'm not going to talk about digitally specifically because again that’s not – you heard me says before that’s not the way we think about our company. And just to take the step back and maybe reiterate as I said in the prepared remarks, with the [indiscernible] market continues to be very competitive, continues to be structured and we like just as a backdrop and also advertising continues to replace closer and closer and closer to the airing day. I think we are doing and the team is doing really a great job. We continue to outperform, I think if you look year-to-date the industry is flat – were down over 2% and we are delayed by couple hundred basis points, that's great. From our standpoint and this also gets to the investments that we're making as a company and we use this word 21 Century capabilities multi-platform. And that's really what sets us apart and if you look at all the earnings for the big digital players they have been out recently, I think in terms of reinforces why we've got to move as fast as we can and continue to transform, which we started doing, which is why you're seeing us outperform the industry and have 18 consecutive revenue growth quarter. Transform our advertising via data led and automated, so we're offering more closely resembles both what and how traditional offering are out there and also the way advertisers and advertising agencies are all of our partners expect our staff to upgrade. You've heard me talk a little bit about this in the past. We have industry leading capabilities with SmartAudio. We’ve got groundbreaking Sound Point programmatic platform and we're able to provide the massive scale that we have over 271 million users that we reach on a monthly basis able to provide their massive scale in broadcast radio with the power of digital and informed audio targeting. And that’s – we’ve talked about SmartAudio that we can create ad solution to the advertiser expect today and with SoundPoint were changing the way of advertising inventories important. So a lot of words, but it just says we have to continue to reinvent ourselves and I think all the data point out there both in terms of our results and the reporting results from a lot of good digital players reinforce and confirm that the direction that we're taking this company. And that’s giving us the outperformance on the topline growth.

[David Farber:]

Understood. Okay. On the cost side, excluding the contract adjustments OpEx continues to move higher, I guess I'd be curious to hear what’s driving that and what your expectations are for OpEx for the balance of the year? And then I had one final question for Brian and that's it. Thanks.

[Richard Bressler:]

Great. So look I’ll tell you couple things. If you exclude the one-time benefit we had in 2016, expenses were up slightly due to our spending on everything I just articulate really our digital initiatives. Again, I pointed back if you go back to four or five years ago when we spent and we have – period of time a number of quarters our earnings were down and then I think that spending on the return on that investment go through and again that’s why I pointed to backdrop. We have done historically Bob and myself and the rest of the management team from a credibility standpoint and point you today are not just about that reference points, but against what the big digital players are doing, and I think confirming we're in the right direction, I think it's evidenced by our revenue. But the one comment I would make on the margins, what I did say in the beginning of the year as we did expect the advertising environment to pick up, we expected more robust environment that has still not happened and still continues to be our more sluggish than we would like. And what I've said is that we're going to continue to make margin improvement since the first quarter. And I think if you look at the margins in the first quarter of 2017 versus the second quarter of 2017 versus the third quarter of 2017, our margins in terms compared to where they were last year, quarter-over-quarter, quarter-over-quarter, quarter-over-quarter we made very significant improvement and we continue to make that improvement as we go into the fourth quarter of this year. So Brian – you had a question for Brian?

[David Farber:]

Yes. I just wanted to know what the current liquidity position is sitting here in November, and that’s it for me. Thanks.

[Brian Coleman:]

Yes. I'm not sure we can comment beyond the third quarter, David. So I think we've got the third quarter information in front of us. There hasn’t been any material things that it wouldn’t be public. But I don't think I can give you cash balances as of the current time. So unfortunately, I can't be very responsive to that question.

[David Farber:]

Okay. Just talk about the end of the third quarter then perhaps? And then that's it.

[Brian Coleman:]

The end of the third quarter, it's all in our disclosures. Is there something specific that you're asking about?

[David Farber:]

Just between the ABL and the cash, I guess I was trying to make sure I understood the ABL line in particular, as well as what kind of cash [indiscernible] in the system? Thanks.

[Brian Coleman:]

Yes. We had cash of about $286.4 million for our financial statements at the end of the quarter and had $224 million that was at outdoor and $64 million of that was at iHeart. The ABL was I think at $360 million to $365 million drawn, so it had some availability remaining under that.

[Richard Bressler:]

And I think that’s all disclosed within the…

[David Farber:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from the line of Stefan Beson from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

[Stefan Beson:]

Good Morning. I had a couple questions on Outdoor. First, Americas seem to decelerate during the quarter. Could you give us a little bit of color as to what happen as the quarter went on maybe local versus national?

[Richard Bressler:]

If you setback to the question, if you tell that’s decelerating, I'm not sure what you comparing it to, again [indiscernible] in terms of pacings at a given point in time, I said it three times in my prepared remarks and I’ll repeat it again, it’s something that we've continue to give out because we've historically give it out. But if you go back to the comment – just a question – just answering the previous question, about advertising being placed closer and closer that was a statement that went both for our audio business at iHeartRadio business along with our Outdoor business. So again there's no – so that’s referenced, it's hard to really comment on. In terms of the business, overall the local business was a bit softer with the national business strengthening this quarter. We feel great about the topline fundamentals which are promising. We’re doing more and more with advertisers on audio insights. We've done a great job and continuing to improve our speed of execution here in the U.S., with Scott Wells and Bob. The team here has really done outstanding job by picking up the pace there. So the American Outdoor remain encouraged by all of the stuff, our strategic ongoing investments, speed to market, version technologies, taking more advantage of mobile data analytics, so we feel very good about that. And I comment that again in my opening remarks, about RADAR. Our data analytics tool that we launched in 2016 early, and this fall we launched the industry’s first private marketplace programmatic out-of-home buying solution and we also expanded RADAR in the second quarter of this year with the addition of two best location intelligence and attribution solution. So again, a lot of fancy words, but what it really means is that we can see evolving change not just the iHeart part of the business, but also the U.S. and international part of the outdoor business to keep up with what our advertising and marketing partners demand and expect of us.

[Stefan Beson:]

Great. And then was there any impact from any of the storms or fires that in California regarding revenue EBITDA or possibly repairs?

[Richard Bressler:]

No significant impact, I mean I do want to reiterate again just how proud Bob and myself and the rest of management team, the important work that all our teams did across the company and the impacted areas including lifesaving, rescues, probably worth noted again. We had our Fiesta Latina this last weekendin Miami at the American Airlines Arena and we paid tribute to the first responders and those of you that have got a chance to see it, we really in between the chat, thanks to people that really made a difference in the first responders, in addition to our employees, but no we awards of anything significant. We have a small part of our business in several airports in the Caribbean on the Outdoor side. There were substantial devastation and everybody on the calls [indiscernible]. And so given the approximately guidance to cover from the extensive damage just a little bit day lives, our business in those locations won't be back to normal currently some time next year, but from a financial standpoint it's not material to the company.

[Stefan Beson:]

Thank you so much.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from the line of Avi Steiner from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

[Avi Steiner:]

Thank you. Just a quick follow-up to last question, on the radio side, any impact in either Houston and/or Miami last ad-dollars?

[Richard Bressler:]

No nothing significant, Avi, obviously, again our reiterated about our teams, which I want to continue emphasizing the great job and we are proud of them. From a financial standpoint, we saw some pick up in Houston quite frankly because of the devastation has chose the number of close, our people left in that market obviously have to replace cars and homes and home improvements. And things like Southern Florida they had enough time to evacuate, so there was really no real material impact out there and we all know what happened with the storm. It did not hit, but no – overall no real significant impacts for the Company's financial.

[Avi Steiner:]

Okay. And then on the liquidity front, working capital has been negative, the mix that I look at it really first nine months of the year. Any reasons that won’t reverse in the fourth quarter and help you generate positive free cash flow in the quarter?

[Richard Bressler:]

Well, look I don't think we want to provide guidance to any operating metric in the fourth quarter, I mean historically you can see what has happened with respect to working capital and it has been generated, but don't want to make any speculative assumption on fourth quarter of this year Avi.

[Avi Steiner:]

Okay. Fair enough. And just sticking on the liquidity theme. If I assume that the ABL gets extended or otherwise turned now and you continue to chip away the 10s, in your estimation, the company still has to raise incremental liquidity to make it through the first quarter of next year.

[Brian Coleman:]

I don't know Avi. It sounds a whole lot like a cash flow forecast for the first quarter. I do think and as we disclose the advance negotiations on the ABL, so I think we’ll continue to work through that, you understand historically how cash flow works in the fourth quarter. You have chipped away a lot of 10 there's only a little more than 50 in January. So I don't want to get into a backward forecast to put free cash flow between now and then, it looks like I'll let you make those assumptions on your model based on the information that’s out there.

[Avi Steiner:]

Okay. Fair enough. Maybe another one on liquidity. I’ll try to avoid forecast, but I think the company wanted to feel with respect to the move – broader media, has there been any consideration given to trying – and trying to unlock that value maybe to help liquidity in the near-term or is it fair here to say you're maybe focused elsewhere and not on that.

[Brian Coleman:]

Yes. I think we're going to be three year, Avi because I don’t want to speculate on potential transactions using our unrestricted subsidiaries. You’ve seen us [indiscernible] exchange transactions, but forward looking what we may or may not do is, is not something I want to speculate on the call. So apologies, [indiscernible] giving the answer that I can.

[Avi Steiner:]

Understood. And maybe I'll try this quoting capital structure per say. Would it be possible I'm guessing no, but I'll try to update us on sponsor’s current debt holding?

[Brian Coleman:]

That’s provided publicly when we required to provide it and we have to obtain that from the sponsors themselves. So I don't think we provide interim updates because we don't have them.

[Richard Bressler:]

I mean Avi that’s related question for the sponsors. End of Q&A

[Richard Bressler:]

I really thank everybody. Appreciate everybody for the time. Appreciate the questions. And our team with Eileen and Brian around to answer any follow ups. Thank you everybody.

[Operator:]

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