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On Wednesday, 28 May 2025, Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc (NYSE:CCO) presented at TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2025. The company shared its strategic outlook, highlighting the stability of its U.S. operations and its focus on digital transformation. While Clear Channel remains optimistic about future growth, challenges such as regulatory constraints on digital expansion persist.
Key Takeaways
- Clear Channel is focusing on deleveraging its balance sheet and digital conversions.
- The company has achieved significant cost savings from international divestitures.
- Airport advertising revenue has grown significantly, outpacing passenger traffic.
- The MTA contract is expected to become profitable by 2025.
- Clear Channel is optimistic about navigating economic challenges, with no signs of a recession impacting operations.
Financial Results
- Revenue & Bookings: Clear Channel’s Q2 bookings are 85% complete, aligning with past performance. The MTA contract is anticipated to be profitable in 2025.
- Cost Savings: Achieved $35 million in savings post-divestitures, with more expected by 2026 as TSAs wind down.
- Balance Sheet: The company holds approximately $300 million in cash and plans to lower its baseline liquidity level.
- Debt & Interest: Reducing debt remains a priority, with interest expenses expected to decrease, freeing up cash flow.
- Capital Allocation: Digital conversions are prioritized, targeting high returns of 30% or more.
Operational Updates
- Airport Business: Revenue from airport advertising has increased significantly over the past decade, driven by larger airport focus and strategic partnerships.
- Advertising Verticals: AI adoption is increasing, especially in San Francisco. Media & entertainment advertising remains strong, while auto insurance and pharma are showing gradual recovery.
- Digital Conversion: Prioritized based on market demand and regulatory factors, with programmatic availability for roadside and spectacular inventory.
Future Outlook
- Digital Expansion: Continued focus on digital conversions, guided by advertiser demand and regulatory environments.
- Deleveraging: Ongoing debt reduction efforts, utilizing cash flow and asset sale proceeds.
- Cost Optimization: Further cost reductions expected as TSAs expire, particularly in finance and compliance areas.
- Strategic Focus: Concentration on the U.S. market, leveraging existing infrastructure for roadside, spectacular, and airport advertising.
Q&A Highlights
- Recession Concerns: Clear Channel sees no immediate recession signs, attributing stability to lessons learned during COVID-19.
- MTA Contract: Profitability expected by 2025, with revenue ramping up over time.
- Tariffs: Minimal direct impact from tariffs, though indirect effects on auto and retail advertising are possible.
For a more detailed analysis, readers can refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - TD Cowen’s 53rd Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2025:
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay, great. Hi, everyone. I’m Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst here at TD Cowen. I’m delighted to have the Clear Channel team here with me, Scott Wells, of course, CEO Dave Saylor, CFO. Why don’t we just jump right in?
When I like I always like to start sort of at the macro level and then kind of get more and more narrowly focused as we go. So the question that we get all the time is, what are you guys seeing over the past couple of weeks? We heard you a month ago on your earnings call. We heard you at JPMorgan a couple of weeks ago. Any change in the tone from advertisers as you think about what’s going on in the world from a macro perspective?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: Well, first, thanks for having us, Lance. It’s good to see you. But to answer your questions, jumping right in, we really have not seen a change in things at this point. The marketplace still seems to be running campaigns. The most responsive thing we have in programmatic continues to perform well.
So we’re feeling good.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Great. And just is the clock I want to make sure that I have a sense for how much time we have left, and I don’t see that running. Is that going to start? Yes, that’s okay. We go.
All right. Thanks, guys. So okay. So let’s talk about then the traditionally, I would say, historically, out of home has held up relatively well in recessions, right? We’ve gone back and we’ve looked from the early 90s through the early aughts, relatively modest compression, relatively quick recovery, COVID aside, of course, and the great recession aside.
But a lot has changed with the medium. And if we were to experience if we were to experience another sharp economic downturn, how do you think out of home would fare relative to how out of home has fared in the past? And when you think about things like increased digital penetration, when you think about things like social media no longer being in its infancy but now being much more mature, how do those factors play in?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: Yes. Well, first off, we don’t see any sign of a recession. So you stressed if, and I’ll stretch stress if right back at you. I think it’s interesting. I think that lessons were learned in COVID by advertisers, and that might be part of the reason why we have been so rock solid right now because a lot of people canceled things.
And when they came back, the stuff they wanted wasn’t available or was a lot more expensive. And so because that was the silver lining in the midst of everything else that went on, everything else went on with COVID. So I do think you’re right in differentiating the print and digital sides of the business. It is sort of it would stand to reason that you’re going to have a little bit of a different behavior by the two parts of it. I’ve said in a variety of settings, when COVID happened, programmatic like literally just turned off, but it was also the first thing that came back.
And so the bull case in this one, and I’m going to choose to be bullish, is that we maintain the nice stability with the long term print contracts, and we have the faster in, faster out going on in the digital side of it and manage to work our way through. But every one of if we’ve learned nothing else, and this is a management team that has a lot of experience with downturns, going back to the dot com bubble, we have people leading chunks of our business who were active during that. And that had its own disruptions at the time, and it was nothing like the great financial crisis or COVID for our industry. Obviously, it was really rough on a variety of other places. But given that experience, I feel good about our ability to navigate it.
And I do think one of the biggest things, and I’ve been a broken record on this, and I can’t seem to get it through the investing public’s mind. But the degree to which we’ve derisked this business is enormous, and we should be getting a lot more credit for that than we are.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: And part of that was selling the international businesses?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: Yes.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: So how does that sort of affect the volatility or the variability of
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: the business going forward in your mind? Well, I think most of the time that we’ve talked about the variability of it, we have had a U. S.-centric view, which is why COVID was such an ugly surprise for some investors on our side just because you hit all these minimum guarantees. And in many geographies, you didn’t get relief. The way we managed it, if you think about the airports business, we often say, well, it’s kind of similar to European business.
It really isn’t because the airports are actually a lot more negotiating in their relief. I mean if you look at what we paid in rent in kind of the first full year out of COVID and you look at the amount of relief we got, those of you who are following our stocks know we had a lot of relief come back. We probably got 70% or 80% of one year’s rent at a normal run rate back over four or five years after COVID. That did not happen in Europe. It particularly didn’t happen in Southern Europe.
And so that has a lot to do with why as a highly levered company, those businesses didn’t make a lot of sense in our portfolio. They’re perfectly fine businesses. They’re going to do great with their new ownership, I’m sure. But for some company that has the interest obligations we have, it never made sense to have those kind of businesses in our portfolio.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: It’s interesting. I think there was a comment that you made maybe on the earnings call where your airports revenue is up like 10x over so many years. And obviously, traffic through the airport over that same period is up something much less than 10x. So you’ve become much more the yield on your passenger traffic has gone way up. What do you think is driving that?
And how do you expect that to sort of look as we think about the coming ten years versus the past ten years?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: So there’s a variety of things that have happened, but I think a big part of it has been a specific choice and the shout out to Morten Goderop, our leader in that business for staking the strategy out of kind of fewer, bigger, better and focusing on larger airports. If you look at our airport count, it’s many fewer than what we had a decade ago. But we’re generating substantially more revenue off of it because we have brought more of a sponsorship and kind of ownership brand ownership mentality, which is giving us, in addition to the normal people that just want to be in an airport for a product launch or for some sort of event or there’s kind of a normal churn of advertising that you’re going to get no matter what. If you happen to have that particular airport and Dreamforce is happening, you’re going to get people who want to reach people going to Dreamforce. So that kind of advertising is kind of always there.
What we have really done in the last five or six years is we’ve gone in and we’ve targeted verticals, gone very deep with the verticals on what ownership of a terminal or ownership of a security area or pick inventory piece could mean for them. And then that’s led to larger, longer contracts, and it’s a lot easier to grow a base if you have two- or three year contracts instead of all two month contracts. And that’s been the key. And I think as we it also has been very good for the airport authorities. And just on the whole recession point a minute ago, got to give a shout out to Memorial Day weekend was like the biggest Memorial Day weekend in history, and it was one of the top like three days in
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: the last toughest. Like ever. Yes. I mean we had across The U. S, there was over roughly 14,000,000 passengers went through.
One day, there was in excess of 3,000,000 in a day. And normally, you’re at a $2,000,000 run rate, a little over $2,000,000 So it was very, very busy.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: So how sensitive generally are your airport contracts to changes in foot traffic? Or is there any sensitivity?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: Well, I mean, clearly, there’s a sensitivity, particularly, again, COVID being an extreme example. God willing, we won’t have something like that anytime soon. But all out of home got painted with a brush of everybody’s in their houses, and that was true for about ten minutes. But everybody got painted with that, and took a while to reverse that. I don’t think passenger traffic passenger traffic is important at a level.
Much more important is the kind of passenger demographic. The profile. And as long as that profile is skewing the way it’s skewing now, that is very desirable to a number of verticals that they buy our biggest contracts are in airports. Even though it’s a much smaller line of business, our biggest customers, individual customers reside in the airports division because there are advertisers who are just deeply convicted with what that opportunity to brand does for them, what that opportunity to reach that audience does for them.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: So you talked about verticals. I guess the four verticals that I’d like to discuss with you are the AI that’s going on in San Francisco, tech, I guess, the market of San Francisco. Media and entertainment ties into the market of Los Angeles, where I know you have a big presence as well. And then auto insurance, had been returning after a very long lengthy depression almost. And then lastly, I would say pharma, which is kind of a newer developing opportunity for you.
But maybe could you just give us an update on each of those four?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: Sure. Well, AI, it’s obviously still early days. And it’s not just San Francisco, but San Francisco is the most prominent. If you crosstab the vertical with the market, that would But I mean I just had one come through my e mail right before I walked in here where somebody is actually trying to reach Spain as an AI company.
So which we still have Spain, we can help them out. So I think the thing that’s interesting on AI is it’s following the pattern that emerging tech companies have had in terms of using out of home to punch above their weight early in their development to push their AI stories, too. But it’s the emerging growth ones that I think are the big opportunity right now. Media and entertainment, the slate looks really strong, and the studios appear to be planning to support the slate. So everything we’re seeing there looks encouraging, particularly for the second half.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Is it still the case I’m sorry to interrupt, but is it still the case that the movies though versus TV scripted TV shows generate the lion’s share of the spend in that category? And the reason I ask is because and again, I’m not studying this daily, but I’m a little surprised to hear that you’re excited about the building slate. And at the same point, it just seems like the volume of streaming content is just growing by leaps and bounds every day seemingly. And so do you participate in that?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: We do. I mean we participate across, but it’s nothing like it was five years ago at the outset of streaming when, I guess, 2019 was probably the year that we saw the biggest streaming war activity when everybody was trying to do their Studio Plus launch and whatnot. That is not as heavy. I was going to contrast kind of movies versus more traditional television because I do think that’s a vertical that we don’t participate that heavily in but that really tends to like transit. And so you see because they really like reaching the full scale, it’s kind of a numbers game at some level.
So we participate less in the television part of it. Streaming is kind of closer to movies. But since most of those companies are trying to get to profitability now and most of them have established I mean there are so many crosslinks where you can get the content of one studio from every platform now, which was not the case a number of years ago. I think they’re using a somewhat different model, but we do see some activity there. It’s just nothing like what it was in 2019.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: That makes sense. And so the the advertising for streaming is not really born around specific content entrance so much as it is the platforms themselves.
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: It’s around the platforms. And and, I mean, you you can see if you go out to the Sunset Strip, which I know you do, it’s not just Netflix that has branded their signs. Other people have subbranded other people’s signs so that streamers are kind of owning locations in parts of Los Angeles. And I’m not sure how broad it’s gone in other parts of the country. You had going back to your original question, you’d asked about auto insurance.
So auto insurance was a terrible desert for us for a while. It is coming back. It’s not anything like its full potential, but I’m encouraged to see the advertisers coming back. We always had kind of local agent business still going on, but the national parts of insurance are coming back, and we’re encouraged by that. Again, a lot farther to go to get it back to anything like what it was at peak.
And then pharma, pharma is one we have been pursuing pretty aggressively. It’s a great intersection of the kind of inventory we have with the data and analytics that we do. And that is really, really promising, but it is hard. And it is because they are very metric driven and they’re very methodical. So you kind of go through the test cycle with them, campaign, then you assess the full campaign, and then you work on getting in the budget cycle for the next year.
It’s a journey, but it’s a journey that we’re more than a few steps down the road on.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: So when you think about your verticals and your exposure there, are there any that worry you with respect to tariffs? And I’m not talking about the general macro sense of people just spending less because of tariffs, but specifically as a response to higher input costs, do you see any Sure.
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: No, from a tariff standpoint, I don’t think we have a ton of exposure. I think it is more on the whole macro when I just think about ad sales in general. But the two I’d point out, one would be auto and we’ll see where that goes and it seems to be getting pushed off, which is good. And we actually probably saw a good advertising when the tariffs first came out because the auto companies were trying to beat So you saw that you saw a little bit of that. And in retail, to a certain extent, it depends on the client, It depends on the advertiser, but you’re going to see that as tariffs come along.
Those are probably the two areas I’d say the most we would have exposure.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: And then you mentioned you still have Spain. Just to sort of shift gears here a little bit and talk about the refocusing of the company. You sold Brazil recently, small transaction obviously of course, but was there any cash that came in to from that transaction? Or was it just sort of like you take
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: the assets and we’ll It hasn’t closed yet.
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: Yes, it hasn’t closed yet. No, but cash will come in. And I there a purchase price that was out there that was roughly about $32,000,000 which included cash that came in that was really trapped in the business. And there’ll be fees and expenses that will go against that. But no, it’s a transaction.
There’s definitely value in that business. And on the flip side, we still have Spain, and that was we were in contract with JCD for roughly $65,000,000 That business has performed very, very well over the last couple of years. So I expect that transaction as we we’re in the middle of that process. And when that kind of goes through, I will expect that to be definitely higher than what it was before from JCD. So looking forward to that.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Great. And then I guess maybe to come back to The U. S, the MTA contract that you recently took on right here. Could you sort of talk a little bit any update about the revenue ramp versus the mags that you have in the beginning of the year and the negative margin pressure and so forth?
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: Sure. I mean just to talk about it from a margin standpoint for a contract. And I guess the first thing I’d say about that contract, excited about it. It’s going to be a very good contract for the company. It opens up New York.
It gives us a lot of coverage and a very big DMA that we didn’t have in the past. Obviously, we had signs in New York, which just gives us such a great platform, especially for our national ad sales, but it will be both national and local. So looking forward to it, it’s roadside, above ground, just to be clear on the assets that we have. But going back to your question, from a margin standpoint, that contract started on November 1, and we’ve kind of negotiated pretty much like into October. So but when that contract starts on day one, your MAG starts.
You start paying for it. And the way you account for that MAG is you straight line it throughout the year. So the MAG that you’re paying in January is the same that you’re paying in December. But the revenue is a little bit different. When you get that contract in November, that’s going to ramp up over time.
So your ad sales in the first quarter are going to be very different what they’re going to be in the second, third and fourth quarter. But what we’re seeing right now, it’s actually ramping very well. I like what I say about the MTA. We’re building on the first quarter. It’s a lot higher in the second quarter, and I see that continuing throughout the year for that contract to be profitable in 2025.
So at this point in time, I feel really good where we are with that contract.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Oh, you know what, actually, you reminded me speaking about bookings, right? You’ve talked about this quite a bit recently. The bookings seem to be very strong. I think you’ve said that 85% or more of 2Q has sort of come in. Maybe that’s higher today.
I don’t know if you can update us on that number. But regardless, in that the majority of the revenue for 2025 as it relates to your guidance has come in as well. How do those figures compare with what you would have seen last year, the year before? Is there are you seeing any change in timing of booking relative to what you’ve seen historically? I mean, not particularly.
Every year has a little bit of a different rhythm. And obviously, programmatic as it grows,
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: that tends to be back end. You’re getting those dollars, you’re kind of recognizing them right up to when the day the quarter closes. And so that changes the rhythm of it a little bit, but it’s not so big as to distort the whole thing. So the lay in is pretty consistent. I mean we’re always going against what our budget is, which is in excess of our guidance, just to give a little inside baseball, we’re not crazy.
And so when we think about how we’re sitting for the balance of the year, we feel like we’re in the hunt. There’s nothing that has changed to cause us to think differently than what we said at our last earnings call.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: I guess I was thinking that given that you’ve got so much more of your revenues today coming from digital versus static, that the digital would tend to book later perhaps just given the wider use cases. In other words, I realized that I’ve got more tickets to sell for the big event at the concert hall. I’m not that’s not going to show up in the booking six weeks ago, but it might show up
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: in revenues today. There’s some of that, but it isn’t enough. I mean, I think so like, look, we were early to building digital within the space. And so I think we went through a lot of that timing shift a number of years ago. And now, yes, as programmatic grows, there is the later booking that comes into play.
But it’s not we’re not it’s not causing us forecasting trauma. I mean, Dave and his team are pretty good at nailing the forecast.
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: And that’s something we’ve done for years. I mean we’ve been putting in digitals. We know how many we’re going put in the ground. We have a pretty good feeling of what they’re going to book that next year, the current year. So that’s all accounted for.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: And our IRRs for digital conversions still holding with historical norms and 30%, And so are you prioritizing digital conversions differently in different markets? I mean, where are you seeing the biggest opportunities right now? And how much of that is a function of advertiser demand versus permitting environment and so forth?
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: I think it’s a combination of all those things you’re talking about. I mean we have 27 markets, and we’ll be developing signs across all our markets. And really, you’re looking at locations. You’ll look where you think you’re going to get the demand, can you put a new board in where you don’t have coverage in the past, then also regulatory plays in it. That’s probably the biggest areas, how many can you put in.
But I think we have a pretty good system across our markets of where we want to put digitals, where we want to put either organic build or conversion. I mean really, I guess, the thing where you would see something big is when an ordinance open up in a certain market where you can put more digitals and spend a little bit more. But from a normal year over year, we’re kind of in that 70% to 90% range that we’re looking at conversions and organics. But there’s a wide range of reasons why you’re going to put in a board certain locations and whatnot. But we manage that through our infrastructure of our business.
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: That regulatory point is really big, and you’re getting to a point now where you’re having markets north of 50% digital revenue and you’re having markets that are sub-twenty percent. And when you have a big market that is in the 20s, that’s the place that you’d love to convert, but the reason that you can’t is because the regulatory isn’t there. So that is an it’s a never ending story. We’re always working on it. And that’s when you would see us really flex up on doing digital conversions because turning everything digital in a market that’s north of 50% may be a great long term goal, but it’s not the most efficient deployment of capital in the short term.
You want to lock in the locations that are strategic and you want to build scale because markets behave differently when they get north of 40 digital. You get a different kind of cadence with the advertisers, and you see advertisers coming on to the medium that maybe didn’t come on to it when it was 20% digital. So it’s important to get to that level of penetration. But with our 27 markets, our gating factor is regulatory at this point, not capital.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: And roughly, what proportion of your markets are you kind of at that 40% threshold level, would you say?
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: We price overall, we’re obviously in the 30s. We’re roughly at 35% from a revenue standpoint. It’s probably 3% or four above 50 And then your lion’s share is going to be between middle 20s to roughly 45%, but not like a specific
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: So a lot of opportunity there. Sounds Absolutely.
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: There’s still and that’s how we do the annual cadence that we’re doing. Because again, we were early to building out this footprint, and that has been great for us because there are markets where we have very unique digital presence because we were early footprint down.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: And what proportion of your digital inventory is currently monetized by programmatic?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: So we have all of it. All of the roadside is available programmatically. Most of the spectaculars and a decent portion of airports. So it’s
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: a lot.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: What is the gating factor there? Why isn’t 100% or will it ever be a % or is there some structural reason?
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: It’s usually it’s usually tech or in the case of an airport complex copy approval rules because getting copy approval done in the cadence of programmatic can be some airports are much more difficult than others on what they’ll accept.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: I see.
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: Because they all of them pretty much prohibit advocacy and political advertising. But some airports want to sign off on everything, and that makes them not a great candidate for programmatic.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. We have a few more minutes. I want to shift gears and talk about the cost side and maybe the balance sheet quickly if we can. On the cost side, dollars 35,000,000 in corporate cost savings already achieved. What additional levers do you see at your disposal in 2025, ’20 ’20 ’6?
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: Yes, absolutely. I mean, when you think about where our company was when we got $35,000,000 out and that’s those are directly attributable selling Europe, selling Latin America. But we still have an infrastructure of a global company because we still have the TSAs on both sides in the South and also in Europe. But as those start to run down, when you think about finance, audit, legal, compliance, tax, we’re going to take a look at the business because right now, our corporate infrastructure, even with that 35 out, is set up as a global company. We are going to sit down as we get through the TSAs, and we’re doing that honestly right now, and really zero base it and see if you’re going to build it today, do you need to run this business?
I mean our corporate costs were roughly 135. We got that 35 out, so we’re kind of in the high 90s. There’s additional cost that will come out. You’ll see probably a lot of that trickle out a little bit in ’25, but mostly in ’26 as the TSAs run off and we kind of set up with the company going forward. So there is more opportunity.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: So on the balance sheet, I think you have about 300,000,000 of cash currently on hand that’s taking into account some payments that you made post quarter. What’s the new baseline liquidity level you’re comfortable with? And how do you think about cash versus availability under your credit facilities and so forth?
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: It’s actually it’s nice you’re asking these questions because in the past, it would have been when you sell in Europe, and we always had more liquidity because of what Scott said earlier. It was the company has been derisked in the sense that if you did have that downturn, you wanted that cash on hand. While being just a U. S. Business, it is a much more derisked business.
So from a cash standpoint, I think, look, the focus now is and you saw what we did coming out of the close where we had $400,000,000 of cash on the balance sheet, obviously, a result of the sales. And that was after paying down the BV notes, and we spent $100,000,000 to pay down debt. We’re going to continue that process. We want to look at our capital structure and start paying down debt, obviously, in the best interest from an interest standpoint. But going back to your question, in the past, we used to probably have at least $150,000,000 of cash on hand.
I think we’ll need less than half that, and it will be a combination of cash on hand and then using our revolvers in our ABL more in the normal sense as opposed to just happening on the side. But definitely a lot less than that 150,000,000 And as I said before, probably less than half that.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Interesting. So as you think about your capital allocation priorities over the next twelve to eighteen months, debt repayment, obviously, but we also have digital conversions. We also have acquisitions potentially. I don’t know if that’s something that you would consider at this stage with the leverage where it is. But how should we think about what you’re like what we’re likely going to see?
Dave Saylor, CFO, Clear Channel: I mean, look, from a capital allocation, we’re going to continue to do digitals. They’re great investments. As you said before, they’re a 30% plus return. So we’re going to continue that program going forward. Debt paydown is obviously very, very important.
And as we get to cash flow positive this year, I mean if you think about the interest expense of where we’re going to be going forward, we’re going to be closer to $350,000,000 than the $425,000,000 we had last year. We’re not quite there yet. But as interest goes down, that’s going to free up cash flow as we’re generating free cash flow from an operational standpoint and you’re paying less interest, you can then start paying down the debt in addition to the proceeds that we’re going to receive. So when I’m thinking about our capital allocation, we’re going to continue to do digitals, chip away at the debt, utilize the proceeds from Spain to look at the debt, that’s going to drive down your interest expense, which is really the cycle that we want to get into.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Great. I think we’re out of time. So thank you again, David and Scott.
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: Thanks, Lance.
Lance Vitanza, Senior Media Analyst, TD Cowen: Appreciate you being here with us.
Scott Wells, CEO, Clear Channel: You’re welcome. Thanks for having us. Thanks.
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