Corporate reports fourth-quarter and full-year financial results before stock markets open on Monday morning.
Analysts surveyed by Zacks expect Gannett to post quarterly earnings of 69 cents a share, according to this story. The current Zacks Consensus Estimate portrays a decline of 16.9% from 83 cents a share earned in the year-ago quarter. The current Zacks estimate for the quarter range from a low of 65 cents to a high of 72 cents.
In a separate survey by Thomson Financial, eight analysts predict slightly lower EPS: 68 cents vs. 83 cents a year before. Those analysts on average forecast $1.39 billion in revenue, down 4.6% from $1.46 billion in 2011.
Following the financial release, CEO Gracia Martore will host a phone conference call with analysts at 10 a.m. ET. The call is open to the public in listen-only mode, and will be webcast from Corporate's website. Details, here.
GCI's stock closed yesterday at $15.22 a share, down 13 cents, or less than 1%, after a strong two-week run-up in anticipation of Monday's report. Over the past 52 weeks, GCI has traded as low as $8.28 a share and as high as $18.93, according to Google Finance's historical figures.
Analysts surveyed by Zacks expect Gannett to post quarterly earnings of 69 cents a share, according to this story. The current Zacks Consensus Estimate portrays a decline of 16.9% from 83 cents a share earned in the year-ago quarter. The current Zacks estimate for the quarter range from a low of 65 cents to a high of 72 cents.
In a separate survey by Thomson Financial, eight analysts predict slightly lower EPS: 68 cents vs. 83 cents a year before. Those analysts on average forecast $1.39 billion in revenue, down 4.6% from $1.46 billion in 2011.
Following the financial release, CEO Gracia Martore will host a phone conference call with analysts at 10 a.m. ET. The call is open to the public in listen-only mode, and will be webcast from Corporate's website. Details, here.
GCI's stock closed yesterday at $15.22 a share, down 13 cents, or less than 1%, after a strong two-week run-up in anticipation of Monday's report. Over the past 52 weeks, GCI has traded as low as $8.28 a share and as high as $18.93, according to Google Finance's historical figures.
If this comes to pass, I'd expect layoffs and or buyouts to follow. But in the opinion of this GCI worker and shareholder, here's what should happen.
ReplyDelete1. No bonuses for Gracia, Dickey, Maryam and company. No pay increases either. Rationale: they have failed to perform and prepare the company for the future
2. Money that was to be budgeted for executive bonuses and raises should be put back in to the company, where it belongs.
3. That money should be used to accelerate development of a GCI smart phone and tablet app. If this company is serious about having a digital platform, they have to be able to deliver the product to the customer. And more customers are using "smart devices". This should have happened yesterday.
4. This should be job 1. Put "content evolution" and "passion topics" on the back burner until this has been accomplished. It doesn't matter how much you monkey around with the content if you can't deliver it to the customer in the manner that they are choosing.
5. If this doesn't happen, stockholders and institutional investors should call for the immediate resignations of the board of directors and top executives for failing in their fiduciary duty to the company.
To put it in football terms (since we're all about the Super Bowl) it's the fourth quarter and the two minute warning has been sounded for Gannett. It's time to decisively move the ball into the end zone or lose the game.
David Payne and his people are all over this. You will be pleasantly surprised. Tom Beusse and his team are enjoying great success with the professional teams. Broadcast is doing great. It's print that is struggling. The haters will hate but for the rest if us it really is going to be an interesting ride. If you'd pause from the "everybody is stupid" speak for a moment and listen to what is truly happening outside of USCP you might just get excited. You can go back to bashing now.
DeleteGreat comments 1:33. Gannett does not understand that most of the time you have to spend money to make money. It has always tried to do the digital thing on the cheap without investing money in staff or giving them the tools. It has almost 100 newspapers and it could have created a digital empire.
ReplyDeleteRevenue keeps falling from the previous year. They will continue to blame the "fragile" economy, but this trend is obviously structural, not cyclical. The executives know this, but they refuse to level with us.
ReplyDeleteWe need a plan to be a smaller company with less revenue and fewer profits. That is the only way to survive.
These are all lucid comments. A pleasure to see!
ReplyDelete10:17 - please enlighten us poor and pathetic newspaper people as to what is going on outside of this company's largest division because, after all, all we know is what we read here. Not like we get a lot of info trickling down from the halls of McLean. Are great plans in the works that are being held secret as a way to keep down moral and ensure that print workers remain miserable so they all eventually quit?
ReplyDeleteYou say broadcast is doing "great." What does that mean? Will the 4th quarter earnings report show a surge in profit at Gannett-owned TV stations?
And if David Payne and his people are so "all over this" how come individual newspaper sites have gone ahead and designed their own apps? Why invest the time and money if Payne & Co. are already doing this work and presumably close to a solution? (How long has he been with the company? How long have smartphones and tablets been around?) Or is this another secret being kept from the downtrodden newspaper division in hopes that we will just go away and stop dragging down the rest of the company?
My guess is Broadcast will be the top performing division. They did well with Olympics and elections and more to come there. Revenue is revenue, and advertising budgets tend to go to TV for the big mass market buy. My guess is Florida is pulling in millions from the primary, and that means bucks for Jacksonville and Tampa. The Brits are struggling, I bet, with all the crisis over there, but the Digital efforts (when you count the partnerships) are thriving. My guess is the chicken brought in more revenue than 20 other properties last year and it was only around for half the year at best. I actually think there are some great achievements in papers, but they are up against so much it's sometimes hard to tell. As a former Gannettoid I can see there are lots of good things out there if you look at the whole landscape.
ReplyDeleteGood to see broadcast doing great. The Olympics and elections should make this a banner year. While print is still the big dog, it inevitably has to get it's costs down in an era of declining print readership and ad revenue. That, unfortunately, means fewer people and cheaper delivery systems and an eventual all digital move.
ReplyDeleteCorporate knows this but cannot rectify cutting and bleeding while making the transition. So the changes and efforts typically come off as weird or ham fisted.
Gracia doesn't have the people skills or panache to pull this off. Her new team talks big, but doesn't deliver, and ostracizes many current employees who bust their asses on the front lines and have for years. Give us proof of why we should buy in to a plan, instead of making us feel like drinking the Kool aide is all we need to do to and everything will be okay.
We could handle cuts, furloughs and shitty pay if there waa the belief that everyone shares in the pain. But that isn't the case, and being force fed the next great management hire and half hearted mantras won't cut it when there is no turnaround on the horizon.
If your pay is shitty why did you accept the job in the first place? You accepted a shitty offer. That doesn't make sense.
DeleteI haven't gone back and looked at Gannett's revenue over the years. But just for overall industry perspective: advertising revenue for the U.S. newspaper industry for 2011 will be about half of what it was in 2005, the biggest year ever. It slid quickly from there.
ReplyDeleteIf Gannett's newspaper division revenue for 2011 is more than half of what it was in 2005, it's doing better than the industry by this one unsophisticated measurement. Of course, "doing better than the industry" is a pretty weak endorsement given the state of U.S. newspapers.