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As CanWest falls, Asper buys CEO considers stock undervalued as investors flee media sector
Grant Robertson July 12, 2008
This winter, CanWest Global Communications Corp. rewrote the rules on stock ownership for senior managers at the company. Among the changes was a new requirement that chief executive officer Leonard Asper hold at least twice the value of his annual salary in CanWest shares on the open market.
The strategy was designed to show the markets that senior executives were committed to increasing the share price. With an annual salary of $900,000 before stock options and bonuses, the 1.1 million non-voting shares held by Mr. Asper at the time put him comfortably above that mark.
Since those November changes, however, CanWest shares have lost about two-thirds of their value in a precipitous slide that has swept through the media sector, causing the stocks of several broadcasters and publishers - from Astral Media Inc. to Torstar Corp. and Corus Entertainment Inc. - to fall sharply amid concerns about an economic slowdown.
Frustrated by the drop, Mr. Asper said yesterday he believes the company is now "significantly undervalued." And so he recently went into the market and bought another $250,000 worth of shares. In time, and with the stock hitting its lowest point since the early 1990s this week, he intends to buy more.
Doing so would make him a rarity in the sector, where retail investors are all but fleeing media stocks across the board. Few companies have been immune to the slide because of concerns the advertising market could crater in a recession, and CanWest's shares have been one of the more acute examples in recent weeks.
"I'm not sitting there on piles and piles of cash myself," Mr. Asper said in an interview after the company issued third-quarter results that showed a $28.4-million loss resulting from several one-time accounting items, including a writedown in the value of its minority stake in The Score television network. A 15-per-cent increase in revenue, and a sense among analysts that the numbers were better than expected, sent the stock up 11 per cent.
"If I'm able to buy stock I do intend to buy more," Mr. Asper said.
Several media companies seem perplexed by the market chill. Astral CEO Ian Greenberg said his company, a radio broadcaster with more than 80 stations across Canada, has seen few signs of an advertising slowdown. Investors appear to be predicting one, though, pushing that stock down nearly 40 per cent so far this year.
In the case of CanWest, which closed at $2.02 on Thursday, down from almost $10 a year ago, the concerns run deeper than the economy. Of particular concern is the company's overall debt, which is at more than $3.7-billion.
Some of that debt comes from the purchase of Alliance Atlantis Communications Corp. last year, in partnership with U.S. private equity player Goldman Sachs Group Inc. It is a deal that has been both a boon and a burden.
It has allowed CanWest to expand into specialty television - the much more attractive, stable and profitable side of the TV business - but it has left the company with little financial room to move.
Specialty TV, and the steady stream of cable subscriber revenue it delivers, is what helped build CanWest's main rival CTV into a powerhouse. When Alliance Atlantis went up for sale, CanWest faced the prospect of those assets falling into a competitor's hands.
"I think people don't appreciate, particularly in Canada, the ability through which we are going to be able to drive growth between the specialty channels and conventional television assets," he said.
Now CanWest must wear the debt associated with the deal. Though CanWest does plan to sell a small collection of British radio stations, liquidating any larger assets to pay down debt is an unlikely strategy in a downturn.
CanWest has subdivided its debt into four groups, parcelling off each bit to different parts of the company. This has allowed it to gain more breathing room, but only somewhat.
CanWest has $985-million worth of debt allocated to its CanWest Media Inc. division. That part of the company has EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $226.2-million, which equals a debt ratio of 4.36. If the earnings fall, and that ratio hits 5, the covenant will be triggered and the company must renegotiate with its banks. Analysts are watching this ratio closely.
It's really sad ... many careers (jobs ) down the drain, the industry drained, quartered and flogged by single ownership, and cross ownership just so some people can play "Monopoly" - roll the dice, and pull the handle, and who are still not satisfied even when they have more wealth than an average person can never expect to earn in 5 lifetimes. They're not builders - they're takers.
About half a dozen years ago, when Canwest stock was down below $4, I bought 800 shares and after holding it for about three years, sold it for around $14, near its peak. Today, I don't think I'd buy any media shares. Sadly, I have stock in Citadel, the U.S. broadcaster and it closed Friday at 83 cents. There's no point in selling it. I can't lose much more. The best media stock I ever owned was Moffat, on which I did very nicely.
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