Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings' Management Discusses Q4 2011 Results - Earnings Call Transcript
Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. (
)
Q4 2011 Earnings Call
February 21, 2012 9:00 am ET
Executives
Brian Coleman – Senior Vice President and Treasurer
Tom Casey – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Analysts
Marci Ryvicker – Wells Fargo Securities, LLC
James Dix – Wedbush Securities
Avi Steiner – JPMorgan
Bishop Sheen – Wells Fargo Securities
David Miller – Caris & Co.
Jaime Morris – UBS Investment Bank
Nadia Lovell – JPMorgan Securities Inc.
Presentation
Operator
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Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the CC Media Holdings and Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. (Operator Instructions) And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to our host Brian Coleman, Senior Vice President and Treasurer. Please go ahead.
Brian Coleman
Good morning and thank you for joining us for our year-end and fourth quarter 2011 earnings call. On the call with me today is Tom Casey, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. During today’s call, we will provide an overview of the year-end and fourth quarter financial and operating performances of CC Media Holdings, Clear Channel Communications and Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings.
For purposes of this call, when we describe the financial and operating performance of CC Media Holdings, we also are describing the performance of its subsidiary, Clear Channel Communications.
After Tom’s comments, we’ll open up the lines for questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call may include forward-looking statements that involve uncertainties and risks. There can be no assurances that management’s expectations, beliefs and projections will result, or be achieved, or that actual results will not differ from expectations.
Please see our annual reports on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of important factors that could affect our actual results.
Pacing data or information may be mentioned during this call. For those not familiar with pacing data, it reflects revenues booked at a specific date versus the comparable date in the prior period and may or may not reflect the actual revenue growth at the end of the period.
The company’s revenue pacing information includes an adjustment to prior periods to include all acquisitions and exclude all divestures in both periods presented for comparative purposes. It also excludes the effects of movements in foreign exchange rates.
During today’s call, we will provide certain performance measures that do not conform to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. We have provided schedules that reconcile these non-GAAP measures with our reported results on a GAAP basis as part of our earnings press releases, which can be found on the investor sections of our website.
A webcast of this call and the earnings press releases that were issued today can be found on the investor sections of our website at www.clearchannel.com, www.clearchanneloutdoor.com or www.ccmediaholdings.com. A replay of this conference call will be available for a period of 30 days.
With that, I will now turn the call over to Tom Casey.
Tom Casey
Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As we look back in 2011, we delivered another year of solid performance, despite the limited economic recovery. Especially important has been our ability to keep generating improved operating margins; thanks to our strategic initiatives and past restructuring efforts.
During the year, we strengthened our business in several important ways. We introduced new products, like our new iHeartRadio application; which offers more than 800 live broadcasts in digital-only stations over 150 cities; plus the ability to create custom radio stations. As part of the new iHeartRadio launch, we staged the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas during September; the biggest live concert festival in radio history.
We launched a series of new initiatives including our strategic partners in distribution and National Programming Platforms. These groups helped enable us to use our scale, to maximize opportunities, for all of our partners; including advertisers and the music companies as well as the technology, automotive, consumer electronics, and other industries. We made significant new investments such as installing 242 new digital billboards in North America during 2011; plus expanding our digital footprint in several international markets including Sweden and the U.K.
On top of these efforts, we continue to deploy capital effectively and produce strategic acquisitions. And at the same time, we stayed disciplined on expenses, while reinforcing our leadership team with executives who have exciting plans for the company. They include Bob Pittman, who became CEO of CC Media Holdings and the Executive Chairman of Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings and William Eccleshare who now overseas all of Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings’ as its CEO.
So let’s turn to the company’s performance in the fourth quarter and full year. I’ll focus on our results for CC Media Holdings and Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings and wrap up with a review of our capital spend and liquidity before we take your questions.
In the fourth quarter, our CC Media Holdings’ revenues increased 1% to $1.65 billion driven by an acquisition of the complimentary Traffic operations to our existing total traffic network, and growth across our digital platforms and street furniture assets, despite the livelihood economic recovery and advertising market.
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