Viacom’s Fourth Quarter: Not A Disaster
This is the soft bigotry of low expectations: Viacom saw its earnings drop by 70% in the last quarter, pushed down by a write-off and weak advertising and DVD sales. But compared to its big media peers, that’s really not so bad.
The numbers: Excluding a $454 million write-off, Viacom (VIA) posted earnings of $0.76 on flat revenues of $4.24 billion. Wall Street had been looking for earnings of $0.77, but the company did meet the revenue consensus.
The write-off? Just a few million more than the $450 million Viacom announced last fall, at the same time it fired 850 people. But since the company doesn’t own any local television stations, and hasn’t made any huge bets on the newspaper business in the last year or so, it didn’t have to announce anything really big. (That sound you hear is the echo of News Corp. (NWSA) and Cablevision (CVC) investors slapping their heads, over and over.)
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