The Sulzbergers own 88% of New York Times Company’s super-shares, which gives them a lock on the company’s board, but a group of investors are looking to add nominees to the Board, having spent $400M to build up a nearly 20% stake in the company, according to Paid Content.
“Super-shares” heh? I believe that’s what Mike Huckabee is counting on to win the Republican nomination. All right, bad one. Anyway:
I understand the logic of trying to shake up a company like CNET who doesn’t have a special voting structure, but will applying any pressure on NYT really make a dent?
While CNET and NYT seem as different as can be, they do share hostile shareholders in common. Apart from that?
CNET has $400M in revenues and trades at a mere 3x revenues for a market cap of $1.2B. Mind you, the company made $170M in net income in 2007, up from a puny $7M in 2006 (when it did $369M in annual revenues).
It’s worth noting that the NYT is trading at $2.82B, but its got revenues of $3.2B, so NYT is in fact trading at a discount to its sales, or 0.88x sales.
The NYT’s net income is $208M for 2007… or $38M more than CNET, even though NYT’s revenue is in fact 7x larger, or $2.42B more.
I know, we’re comparing apples with oranges. Where this bizarro script turns into overdrive is the fact that - according to the ever reliable and accurate comScore - the NYT is actually not only the most popular online property amongst all newspaper companies, with 48M uniques in the 11th slot amongst all media properties, but its - get this - ahead of CNET who is 15th with 34M uniques.
CNET is all about tech-savvy audiences, so you’d think that they’d have an enormous audience online… but then again NYT being so mainstream and what not, I guess it makes sense for the newspaper giant to have more readers online, I guess.
What’s the point of this post? I don’t know. I wonder which company will actually be shaken up by year’s end.
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