Professional money manager AllianceBernstein has apparently boosted its ownership in Gannett again -- making it GCI's single-biggest stockholder. That's pushed another money manager, Brandes Investment Partners, to second place, according to the most recent data, as of June 30.But when I compared two major investor websites today, I got different totals for Alliance. One was a full 2.4 million shares higher. (The Brandes data were consistent.) The figures should be identical because, in theory, all data come from the same regulatory documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
My review came on a day when Gannett's stock was falling again: It traded as low as $11.92 a share this morning, before rebounding on another day of volatility on stock markets overall.
CEO Dubow's real bosses
Alliance and other "institutional" investors control publicly traded companies like Gannett. For example, the combined holdings of Alliance and Brandes total as much as 24.3% of GCI's shares.
So, CEO Craig Dubow (left) really answers to big stockholders -- not individual shareholders like you and me. On paper, Alliance and Brandes have lost hundreds of millions of dollars on their Gannett stock over the past year. That's reason enough to put enormous pressure on Dubow to bring about faster change that might boost the company's stock price.Alliance and Brandes have limited options, however. They can't force Dubow to sell off newspapers, because there's virtually no market: buyers are worried about getting burned. And financing's dried up in the banking crisis. But they could demand more cost-cutting including layoffs, since labor is one of the few expenses Dubow still controls. Plus, Alliance and Brandes could insist the dividend -- a huge source of their income -- be held steady, and not cut. But with the yield rising to a sky-high 12.4% today, Dubow's got to consider a cut.
Alliance and Brandes will be among the big shareholders most interested in Gannett's third-quarter revenue and earnings announcement, scheduled for Oct. 24. Anonymous@10:20 a.m., who posted some of the raw data here, wrote: "Would be interested to know what communications are currently going on back and forth between GCI's board of directors and the major institutional holders. This would include the dividend and seats on the board."
Alliance -- also known as AXA -- emerged as a big shareholder in February, three months after Brandes disclosed its big stake. Brandes owns 25,286,634, or 11.1% of all shares, as of June 30, both Yahoo Finance and MSN Money say.
What's the real number?
Here's the conflicting Alliance ownership data I mentioned earlier; I can't find the original documents in the SEC's database. Can any Gannett Blog readers find them for us?
Yahoo Finance: 30,194,099, or 13.2% of all Gannett shares
MSN Money: 27,828,124, or 12.2% of all
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I think they are doing the fund counterpart of dollar cost-averaging. In other words they are buying at low points and using that purchase to even out their high purchases. But over the next few months, watch as they sell off their high-purchases in order to take a tax loss.
ReplyDeleteOne area that Gannett could assets is Television stations. And since Gannett owns the biggest block of NBC affiliates, they could easy sell a most, if not all to NBC Universal, which seems to have a mountain of cash at the ready this sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteAt my old station, KUSA in Denver, they'd be dancing in the hallways if they could cut loose from Gannett...
And if they got that cash, what would they do with it?
ReplyDeletePoint is that stations are being given away, so selling them isn't something that makes financial sense right now unless you want to liquidate the company.
The major shareholders generally look at theirs as a long-term investment, and even with margins of 10 percent (gee where does that 25% I keep reading about come from, those were from a long, long ime ago) that's better than much of the U.S. major company landscape.
I worry more that Gannett is getting so cheap that the scummiest of bottom-feeders will come along and make a play to buy up the company and sell off the parts. Fortunately, Our Current Economic Meltdown makes the 'selling' part nearly impossible.
ReplyDelete