CBS (NYSE:CBS) is a media company that creates and distributes industry-leading content across a variety of platforms to audiences around the world. CBS owns the most-watched television network in the US and one of the world’s largest libraries of entertainment content. Under the leadership of CEO Les Moonves, our “internal activist”, CBS has succeeded in its goal of being a true content company and monetizing this content value across any distribution channels.
CBS has reduced its cyclical advertising revenue through the spin-off of its outdoor billboard division and the growth of retransmission and reverse compensation fees, and is ahead of its targets to grow fee based retransmission and reverse compensation revenues to $1 billion by 2016 and $2 billion by 2020. With a more stable fee income revenue stream, a strong cash flow and the ability to potentially monetize more non-core assets, CBS is aggressively returning capital to shareholders, and is over half-way through its $6 billion share repurchase program. In fact, there is only $2.5 billion, or just over 10% of the equity market value for the company, left in the share repurchase program. We believe this powerful combination of content monetization, fee revenues growth and capital return should drive share value to our NAV target of $67.
Despite our view of the strong outlook for CBS, shares sold off in 3Q15 as the broader investment community became concerned about the short term strength of the cyclical advertising market. These short term headwinds impacted earnings per share by two pennies, as CBS reported $0.88 cents for 3Q15 vs. original expectations of $0.90, but again the share price impact was grossly magnified, down 30% from June to September. We took advantage of this weakness to increase our position, a move that has, to date, paid off nicely as CBS delivered on its long term strategy mileposts in its 3Q15 report, while also confirming its short term outlook for advertising strength into 4Q15.
CBS’ share price movement in 3Q15 is a good example of how our long term orientation can benefit from short-termism, as in reality all that changed was the discount to our NAV, which gave us the ability to increase our position weighting in the shares.
The price of the common stock for each of Weyerhaeuser, Comerica, Brookdale Senior Living and CBS Corp has declined over the last 12 months in spite of these companies having grown shareholder value. We strongly believe that these are all great businesses. We expect them to be outsized contributors going forward.
From Third Avenue Management (Trades, Portfolio)'s Value Fund fourth quarter 2015 portfolio manager commentary.
