Gannett misses by $0.01, misses on revs
- Reports Q4 (Dec) earnings of $0.53 per share, excluding non-recurring items, $0.01 worse than the Capital IQ Consensus of $0.54; revenues fell 9.7% year/year to $739.3 mln vs the $755.62 mln Capital IQ Consensus.
- Over 100 million unique domestic digital visitors
- "Beginning with the period post-spin from the co's former parent and in conjunction with the execution of new agreements with the company's former parent and certain of its affiliates, the company began reporting wholesale fees associated with sales of certain third party (principally Cars.com and CareerBuilder) digital advertising products and services on a net basis, as a reduction of the associated digital advertising revenues, rather than in operating expenses within our consolidated statements of operations. This change has no impact on reported operating income, operating cash flows, net income or earnings per share."
- Outlook
- "Without taking into consideration the impact of the JMG acquisition, we expect revenue trends to improve over 2015 driven largely by growth in digital. We expect advertising revenues to decline in the 5%-7% range and circulation revenues to decline in the 2%-4% range. EBITDA margins will likely stay under pressure in the short term and improve sequentially throughout the year as we continue to offset incremental public company costs, the earnings impact of declining revenues, higher non-cash pension expense, and lower contributions from CareerBuilder, with ongoing cost efficiency programs and growth in digital revenue," Dickey concluded.