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An eventful month. We have a new Prime Minister with a significant majority. Across the pond, there was an assassination attempt on Trump, and Biden decided not to run for a second term. Cracks began to appear in US tech stocks, causing investors to dump AI giants in a rotation trade and it looks like the UK is becoming a land of plenty, with a... ...
Subscribers were forgiven if they politely yawned after Future surged by £2 after its H1 showed an inflection point in growth, and strong cashflow generation - pretty much what had been anticipated in my main write up in November. Sales were £392m, an organic decline of 2%, with operating profit of £106m representing a margin of 27%. But organic... ...
Ahead of interims on 16 May, FUTR said there had been a return to organic growth in Q2. There have been splendid performances from Go Compare and B2B operations and a resilient performance in magazines, although affiliate and digital advertising revenues were still sluggish. Importantly, there is also confirmation that its Growth Acceleration St... ...
I met with Vin Murria, one of the shrewder dealmakers on the London software scene, again this month. She is an old friend to SCSW. The last time I met her was probably 10 years ago when she was still running her previous company, Advanced Computer Software (then in her late forties), with the remit of building a business in primary care - softw... ...
Completing the trio of publishers to update the market this month (see Bloomsbury and Wilmington), Future’s AGM was told performance has been broadly on track this year, with an improvement in growth being seen since the end of Q4. Within the mix, price comparison site GoCompare and B2B has been faring very well, whist digital ads / e-com affili... ...
SCSW’s traditional New Year ritual is the NAPS mini-portfolio each January. Derived from a French card game named Napoleon, shortened to “Nap,” it refers to the best hand one can have and for us, it is an exercise of providing a select-once-and-leave-for-a-year portfolio. In 2023, I am not sure how satisfying it was that despite witnessing a do... ...
For a business that had a tidal wave of free cash generation of £253m, of which £96m went towards debt reduction (to leave net debt at £327m or 1.25x), a further £47m on acquisitions and £13m on buybacks, any normal market conditions would have seen the shares surge. Instead we had a wild gyration in November, with the shares ranging from £5.50-... ...
Signs are mounting that a long, dull period is over for former glamour stock Future. Between 2017-2021, Future caught the imagination spectacularly. The price went from 352p when I first wrote on them in December ‘17 to a post TMT bubble high of £39 by August 21, a gain of over 1000%, raising the price-earnings ratio to more than 50 as investors... ...
The slow steady decline in newspaper and newsstand magazine sales has persuaded many investors that this is a sector to be avoided. But some “dead tree” publishers, often with the help of fresh management, are coping well with the structural decline in print and creating strong platforms for future growth. You only need to look at the transforma... ...
Future is another advertising share that has been buffeted having fallen 50% in the year to date despite not putting a foot wrong. This month it acquired WhoWhatWear, a digital-only women’s lifestyle publisher based in the US. It has 12m online users and also a strong social media presence, with 10m social followers and makes Future the sixth-la... ...