Tegna is Ripe to Be Sold

Don't be surprised if you see that Tegna is sold before very long. 

Tegna's stock price is trading at record lows and the company has become more focused on just the TV stations. 

In June, Tegna CEO Dave Lougee sold Career Builder in a transaction that netted the McLean, Virginia-based company $220 million. Last year, Tegna spun-off Cars.com, the auto-sales website.

TheStreet.com writes that Tegna has lost half of its value over the past six months as the company's operating revenue has fallen short of analyst projections amid slower-than-expected sales in a non-political year.

The company has also struggled to find the right core of investors in the wake of Gannett's decision to separate its TV-stations from its legacy print businesses. The Cars.com spin-off and Career Builder sale may have confused media investors despite management's use of those proceeds to pay down debt. 

While Tegna is expected to post underwhelming results for the rest of the year, 2018 is forecast to be a turnaround year. That's because Tegna's TV-stations are heavily weighted to NBC, a unit of Comcast Corp. (CMCSA - Get Report) . And in 2018, NBC will carry both the Super Bowl and the Summer Olympics from Russia (the article says Russia, but the games will be in South Korea). That bodes well for re-transmission payments, the fees pay-TV operators pay TV-station owners to carry local broadcasts.

But as the media industry continues to consolidate amid consumer and advertiser migration to digital platforms, Tegna's holdings of 46 stations in 38 markets may be more valuable as part of a larger conglomerate. Activist investors may want to speed up that process.

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