Emmis Communications reports earnings Thursday morning (10/13) for its fiscal Q2 (June-August), which will be its first report since selling three FM stations in New York and Chicago to Merlin Media. That reduced comps for both revenues and expenses.
Emmis Chairman/CEO Jeff Smulyan and CFO/COO Patrick Walsh will host a quarterly conference call for investors and analysts. The analyst ranks, though, are pretty thin. With the recent exit of Jim Boyle from Wall Street there is not a single sell-side analyst covering the stock, so there is no Thomson/First Call projection for the Emmis results. Barry Lucas of Gabelli & Co. is listed as a buy-side analyst covering the stock and, of course, we expect to hear bond analyst Bishop Cheen of Wells Fargo Securities on the call.
As for those comps, Emmis reported $51.7 million in net radio revenues for the quarter a year ago and $66.8 million in total net revenues. Subtract the $7.2 million which came from the three stations now at Merlin and the year ago number for radio is $44.5 million and for the whole company is $59.6 million.
The three stations accounted for $6.2 million in operating expenses for fiscal Q2 last year, out of $37 million in operating expenses for the radio group.
RBR-TVBR recently inventoried the holdings that Emmis retains since its divestitures. Read it here.
RBR-TVBR observation: Emmis is still a minority owner of Merlin, so Jeff will no doubt be asked what he thinks of the re-launched stations. But investors are likely to be more interested in hearing about refinancing efforts, now that the $198 million sale has cleaned up Emmis’ balance sheet.
