Analysts Turn Thumbs Down On Paramount, But Does It Deserve The Gloom?
At least five analysts have downgraded Paramount Global’s stock to something like “underperform” or even “sell” over the past month. For most, it’s clear they’re concerned that Paramount depends a lot on advertising revenue, which it harvests on CBS, its basic-cable networks such as Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, and its streaming services, led by Paramount+ and Pluto TV.
With a likely recession looming over every company’s results, perhaps it’s no surprise analysts are feeling concern for those companies like Paramount that are most likely to be vulnerable in a slower economy, and the resulting crummy advertising climate.
“To be clear those worries are not fanciful,” MoffettNathanson’s Michael Nathanson wrote in a note on Friday, downgrading Paramount Global to “underperform” as part of a broader lowering of expectations for the sector. “Rather, a bevy of concerning advertising data points, especially from the digital companies so far, is driving this anxiety. Of course, media stocks are already signaling cloudy skies ahead as they have sold off as it becomes more evident that the advertising slowdown is real.”
The concern is understandable, particularly after ad-dependent social-media platform Snap reported miserable Q2 results that sent shares plummeting more than 40% on Friday (and that’s after a decline since last December from $75 a share to around $16, a brutal drop of 78%).
Nathanson acknowledged that, “TV advertising hasn’t collapsed as fast as digital advertising due to both a high degree of ad volume coming from prior upfront commitments and the need for bigger brand advertisers to keep reaching scaled audiences through sports and other live programming.”
But if this economic downturn tracks the patterns of previous ones, Nathanson said the slowdown will hit media companies soon enough.
He’s not the only one gloomy about Paramount’s prospects in a crummy economy.
Morgan Stanley’s Benjamin Swinburne downgraded the company to “underweight” and cut the price target for shares from $32 to $22. After outperforming the market the first half of a rugged year, Paramount and the rest of the TV/streaming group is perhaps due for a retrenchment, Swinburne wrote, saying the pivot to streaming "is about to get more difficult."
True that.
Every media company that wants to launch a streaming service has done so. Most are settling into new production pipelines and distribution strategies for their content releases across legacy and DTC platforms. After the Netflix disaster in April’s earnings, everyone has trimmed the sails on their streaming plans.
But perhaps their gloom would benefit from a slight bit of sunshine given how well Bob Bakish and team have navigated the first half of the year, despite having fewer advantages than most of the behemoths they’re competing with.
The company won’t release Q2 earnings until late next week, but in Q1, the company said its biggest streaming service, Paramount+, added 6.8 million subscribers, and had nearly 40 million total. That’s less than a fifth as many paying customers as Netflix, but then again, Paramount+ has spent the past couple of quarters growing at a healthy clip, unlike the Worldwide Leader. In fact, Paramount+’s subscriber rolls are up around 135% over the past year.
Add in the company’s bevy of specialty streaming services (Noggin, Showtime, BET+) and the parent company claims 62.4 million total paying subscribers to its SVOD streaming services. Ad-supported Pluto TV has another 68 million monthly average users.
Most importantly, perhaps, is the company’s growing advertising and subscription revenue from all of its direct-to-consumer divisions, topping $1 billion for the quarter. That’s up 82% year over year.
Paramount+ even has some solid streaming hits. The U.S. flavor of Big Brother is sitting at No. 4 on this week’s Whip Media Watch Report, which tracks who’s watching what (Netflix and Hulu each have four shows in the Top 10). Similarly, Paramount’s The Lost City is No. 7 on Whip’s streaming movie ranker for the weekend (Netflix has five on this list, led by the Russo Bros.’ The Gray Man).
More generally, Paramount+ can count on the newest Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds; the Tyler Sheridan Yellowstone spinoff, 1883; sci-fi video game spinoff Halo; long-running supernatural/procedural Evil; and multiple feature-length South Park episodes to fill out the lineup.
It’s fair to expect that whenever Maverick: Top Gun finishes its $1.3 billion theatrical run (it’s still in almost 3,200 theaters two months after its debut), that film also will attract a lot of attention when it comes to streaming.
But for all that billion dollars in DTC revenue, Swinburne does make a valid point: we (and analysts) still have “limited visibility” into long-term profitability and short-term investment costs around the the entire sector.
So here’s the thing. Analysts have reasons to be more than a bit skeptical about Paramount Global’s near-term prospects, despite the company’s recent very solid achievements. But there’s still reason for hope, kind of.
As Josh Brown, the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, put it on CNBC, if nothing else, Paramount Global is still a gigantic acquisition target, if, say, Apple decides it needs to attach a library to Apple TV+ after all, now that Amazon has MGM’s vast trove.
“I wouldn’t short it,” Ritholtz said, because an acquisition deal could happen quickly, should Shari Redstone decides it’s time to get out. Such a deal would make a bet on lower share prices look very bad indeed, no matter what the analysts suggest for right now.