Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

I mean, travel’s been one of our hot verticals for the last few quarters. And certainly, we’ve seen that play through in airports. But when I look at airports, we don’t really get into talking about contracts because there’s not – kind of none of them, with the possible exception of New York, would count as material, and there’s kind of relatively regular ins and outs. There’s nothing I’d call out in terms of our renewal schedule the next year that’s going to be meaningful. But I would note that we did just go live in Newark Terminal A in Q1 of this year, and there’s still buildout happening on the New York Port Authority contract. So, that still has some room to run. I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the other big innovation that we’ve made, and it’s been meaningful, has been doing more selling by the America sales force into the airports.

So, we have cross-selling between the America sales force and the airport sales force, and that’s gotten pretty meaningful, and that’s something that five years ago was almost negligible. So, I think all of those things give us some room to run in terms of further growing that airports business.

Ben Swinburne: Got it. Thanks so much.

Operator: We now turn to Steven Cahall from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Steven Cahall: Thank you. Maybe first just to go a little deeper into some of Ben’s questions. So, you talked about there being some of these pockets of softness in the US. I think you said that you had fewer headwinds and an easier comp in Europe. So, maybe, how do we just think about within the growth guidance, whether it’s for Q1 or the full-year, how to think about Americas versus Europe. Could we see Europe outgrowing Americas, which is usually not the case on an organic basis. So, would love to get some commentary there. And then, Scott, and Brian, you’ve started giving the AFFO metric, and it would certainly seem like future potential for a REIT structure could create a lot of value for the company. I think debt is still the big obstacle.

And Brian, if I maybe read into some of your comments, it sounds like you might still have some ideas of things you can do this year beyond the Swiss divestiture to manage the balance sheet. So, I’m just curious what options you think you’ve got this year to start to shape the balance sheet to a little lower level of leverage. Thank you.

Scott Wells: Thanks, Steve. Good morning. So, let me take the first part, and I’ll let Brian take the second part. Recall that – it seems like ancient history, but Q1 of last year is when the infamous Omicron was with us, and that hit Europe considerably harder than it hit the US. And so, you have a – it’s just a math exercise a little bit going on. And particularly, there were countries within Europe that were differential hit with omicron. And so, when you think about Q1, you should probably expect that Europe will be outgrowing the US, again, net of currency. I mean, currency always confounds exactly how those numbers are going to go. But that’s probably not an unreasonable way to think about it. And that’s actually true a little bit as you think about the full-year because obviously Q1 is part of the full-year, and there are geographies in Europe that still have not fully recovered from COVID.