Clear Channel results for 2009 – this is…

Clear Channel results for 2009 – this is earnings report week for most radio companies. For the year, CC lost $4 billion on $5.1 billion in net revenues – yet the headlines tout that CC “made” $140 million in the 4th quarter.

SEC filing of announcement

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I'm the guy who used to run StreamingRadioGuide.com (and FindAnISP.com).
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2 Responses to Clear Channel results for 2009 – this is…

  1. Art Stone says:

    Tom Taylor’s story gushed about Clear Channel’s cash flow, but ignored the $5 billion writedown of the value of their licenses…

    • Art Stone says:

      It’s been 30 years since I took business law in college – the law may have changed – but there were two main ways you wound up in bankruptcy. One was if you stopped paying your bills and enough of your business partners forced you into bankrutpcy. The other was if your company owed more than the total value of all your assets – indicating that the company has lost so much money its assets can’t cover the loan (even though you may be current in paying the interest). This is to prevent a company from just borrowing more money to keep paying interest on a bad loan (see: US National Debt)

      The reason the banks aren’t forcing companies like CC into bankruptcy is it would just cascade the recognition of losses to their balance sheets, and probably would not solve the underlying problem of a non-viable business model.

      Clear Channel now has a negative stockholder equity of $6.8 billion, and owes $1.2 billion more in long term debt than a year ago.

      On the positive side, since ad revenue is down, they saved a lot of money on not having to pay sales commissions.

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