Cumulus Media Inc. (NASDAQ:CMLS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Frank Lopez-Balboa: Look, we are very judicious in our portfolio. And we take a point of view that the assets that makes sense in our portfolio, we will pursue them from an acquisition perspective, although, as you know, we’ve been more an investor mode as opposed to an acquisition mode. But we look, we have a balance sheet right now that we can look at acquisitions when it makes sense. These transactions are one-off transactions. We have over 400 stations, we have lots of stations and many clusters and they’re one-off opportunities, where it makes sense to sell them we’ll do that as these two stations generate a gross value of $17 million and the EBITDA that we’re losing from that is really de minimis. So in terms of the accretion as we talked about in our earnings call is really significant. If there are more of those, we would actually obviously take advantage, the opportunity and use that to continue to reduce debt and potentially buyback equity.

Dan Day: Questions, I’ll turn it over.

Frank Lopez-Balboa: Thanks, Dan.

Mary Berner: Thanks, Dan.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Avi Steiner with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Avi Steiner: Thank you, and good morning. A few questions here. One, if I can start on the pacings, please. I think you said down low double-digits. I just want to clarify, does that factor in the headwinds you mentioned or does that hit later in the quarter? And kind of not in the pacing numbers? And what I really want to try and get into is if we strip out political is local, getting better at all sequentially and then I’ve got a couple more? Thank you.

Frank Lopez-Balboa: Sure. Well, at the last year, most of our political dollars kicked in after our earnings call. So it’s not really included in our pacing. But if you look at last year’s results, the political dollars we had last year contributed just approximately 200 basis points in terms of revenues. So that will come in later in the quarter. With regard to local, we talked about on our last call that our local spot businesses, excluding national within our spot business was down 7%. With the green shoots that Mary talked about in the auto category, we would expect the third quarter hopefully to be better than what we saw in the second quarter. Now that’s obviously dependent on the other categories, but the growth that we had with auto, which is a big category for us and was a very big category back in 2019, is helping drive that performance.

But to be clear, within the local spot business, it’s still down versus last year, but that’s going to help us close the gap a little bit.

Avi Steiner: Okay. Thank you. And then on the cost side. Performance this quarter was – than we were expecting. I know you called out on the content side I think a $2 million one-time benefit. I just want to confirm I heard that correctly. But anything else in that line? And I guess what’s driving the year-over-year decline? And is that how we should think about it for the back half of the year?

Frank Lopez-Balboa: Right. Yes. We did want to highlight the one-time benefit such that it’s not modeled going forward. And the cost savings is something that’s clearly very real, and it’s hard to achieve. And every quarter we’re asked a question, is there more? And every quarter we say, we’ll continue to look at our cost base. I think the incremental improvements on costs or reduction in costs, by definition, will probably be smaller as we have a smaller cost base. But having said that, the areas that we continue to focus on are reengineering the business, technical efficiencies, people efficiency if there are opportunities to consolidate markets where it makes sense to do so. Business process improvements, and these are things which is in our DNA from a continuous basis.