If there’s a strong sense among those across the broadcast media industry’s C-Suites that the third quarter is set to be boffo, or at least mildly positive, it looks like those predictions and prognostications are correct.
With encouraging preliminary results from Cumulus Media released last Thursday, Beasley Broadcast Group on Monday kicked off a week full of Q3 earnings reports on a strong note.
Net revenue surged by 112.4%, to $58.9 million from $27.7 million. Net income propelled ahead to $6.1 million (22 cents per diluted share), from $1.7 million (7 cents).
Of course, those results include 18 radio stations formerly owned by Greater Media, thus skewing the results. What’s most important when comparing year-over-year are the pro-forma net revenue results.
For Beasley, a small gain was seen, as pro-forma net revenue inched upward to $58.87 million, from $58.83 million.
Additionally, pro-forma Station Operating Expenses were down, to $42.45 million from $44.78 million.
Better yet, Beasley’s pro-forma Station Operating Income (SOI) surged to $16.42 million from $14.04 million.
That’s a healthy 16.9% increase in SOI, CFO Marie Tedesco noted on the company’s Q3 call with the Wall Street investment community.
BENEFITS FROM PURCHASES
When reviewing the pro-forma numbers, one may ask if the former Greater Media properties are fueling the growth for Beasley — and not its legacy stations.
In Q3 2016, the Greater Media stations accounted for net revenue of $33.59 million; the Beasley properties contributed $27.73 to the total.
While Beasley didn’t break out the dollars for Q3 2017, CEO Caroline Beasley didn’t need to. “Revenue at Beasley’s combined clusters rose 0.1% in the third quarter, outperforming the overall markets, which declined 0.8% according to Miller Kaplan,” she said.
She singled out the former Greater Media Detroit station group, which generated double-digit revenue increases, and Beasley’s Philadelphia cluster, which she said rebounded from a transition-related revenue decline earlier this year to an increase of 1% in Q3. Boston properties formerly owned by Greater Media also enjoyed gains.
“These increases were offset by declines in our Tampa, Charlotte and Las Vegas clusters,” Beasley continued, illustrating the highly accretive impact of bringing the Greater Media stations into the Beasley family.
On her company’s Q3 conference call with investors held Monday morning, Caroline Beasley noted that the flat results were “right in-line” with projections offered in July by the company.
