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Cumulus Media Inc. (CMLS) reported a wider-than-expected loss for the third quarter of 2025, with earnings per share (EPS) of -$1.17, missing the forecast of -$0.71. Revenue also came in below expectations at $180.3 million, compared to the projected $184.4 million. Despite these disappointments, the company’s stock remained stable in pre-market trading, with no change from its previous closing price of $0.147.
Key Takeaways
- Cumulus Media reported a larger-than-expected quarterly loss.
- Revenue declined 11.5% year-over-year.
- Stock price remained unchanged in pre-market trading.
- The company is focusing on digital growth and cost reductions.
- New initiatives include the launch of the Westwood One Sports 24/7 Network.
Company Performance
Cumulus Media’s overall performance for the third quarter showed significant challenges, highlighted by a substantial decline in revenue and a larger-than-expected loss. The company continues to face a weak national advertising environment but has made strides in digital marketing services, which grew 34% year-over-year. Despite these efforts, Cumulus Media is contending with industry-wide pressures and a competitive landscape.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: $180.3 million, down 11.5% year-over-year.
- Earnings per share: -$1.17, missing the forecast of -$0.71.
- EBITDA: $16.7 million.
- Cash position: $90 million.
- Net debt: $607 million.
Earnings vs. Forecast
Cumulus Media’s EPS of -$1.17 was significantly below the forecast of -$0.71, representing a surprise of 64.79%. Revenue also fell short of expectations by 2.22%, with actual figures at $180.3 million against a forecast of $184.4 million. This marks a challenging quarter for the company, as it navigates a difficult market environment.
Market Reaction
Despite the disappointing earnings results, Cumulus Media’s stock price remained stable in pre-market trading, closing at $0.147. This stability suggests that investors may have already priced in the company’s challenges or are cautiously optimistic about its strategic initiatives.
Outlook & Guidance
Looking ahead, Cumulus Media projects continued revenue challenges in the fourth quarter, with expectations of a mid-single-digit decline when excluding political and special impacts. The company remains focused on digital growth and cost optimization, including the launch of the Westwood One Sports 24/7 Network.
Executive Commentary
CEO Mary Berner expressed confidence in the company’s strategic direction, stating, "We continue to make progress in areas under our control." She emphasized the company’s focus on outperforming peers and its bullish outlook on future prospects.
Risks and Challenges
- Weak national advertising market may continue to pressure revenue.
- High net debt levels could constrain financial flexibility.
- Competitive pressures in digital and traditional media sectors.
- Potential economic downturns affecting consumer and advertiser spending.
Cumulus Media’s earnings call highlights the company’s strategic focus on innovation and cost management amid a challenging market landscape. While the third quarter results fell short of expectations, the company remains committed to its growth initiatives and operational efficiencies.
Full transcript - Cumulus Media Inc Class A (CMLS) Q3 2025:
Conference Call Moderator: Welcome to the Cumulus Media quarterly earnings conference call. I’ll now turn it over to Collin Jones, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Development and President of Westwood One. Sir, you may proceed.
Operator: Thank you.
Collin Jones, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Development, President of Westwood One, Cumulus Media: Operator, welcome everyone to our third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. I’m joined today by our President and CEO Mary Berner and our CFO, Frank Lopez-Balboa. Before we start, please note that certain statements in today’s press release and discussed on this call may constitute forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. Actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied in forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management’s current assessments and assumptions, and they are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties as discussed in our filings with the SEC. In addition, we will also use certain non-GAAP financial measures. We believe the supplementary information is useful to investors, although it should not be considered superior to the measures presented in accordance with GAAP. A full description of these risks as well as financial reconciliations to non-GAAP terms are in our press release and SEC filings.
The press release can be found in the investor relations portion of our website, and our Form 10-Q was also filed with the SEC shortly before this call. A recording of today’s call will be available for about a month via a link in the investor portion of our website. With that, I’ll now turn it over to our President and CEO Mary Berner.
Mary Berner, President and CEO, Cumulus Media: Mary, thanks Collin, and good morning everyone. Q3 total revenue was down 11.5% or 5%, excluding the impact of Political, The Daily Wire, and The Dan Bongino Show, which was consistent with the pacing guidance we provided. These results are a reflection of the ongoing headwinds in broadcast radio. Despite the difficult environment, we continue to make progress in areas under our control, and we’ve been acutely focused on gaining revenue and ratings market share, resulting in our outperformance versus our peers across numerous key metrics. Specifically, for the third straight quarter, we grew our broadcast spot revenue market share, reflecting an emphasis on strong sales execution, live and local programming, and our dynamic inventory management capabilities on ratings. We once again grew market share in our PPM markets.
We also continued to grow our digital revenue market share, led by the performance of our Digital Marketing Services business, which was up 34% in the quarter. We further reduced costs, adding $7 million of annualized cost in the quarter, bringing year-over-year to date savings to $20 million and total fixed cost reductions over the last five years to more than $182 million, or more than 30% of our 2019 fixed cost base. We continue to leverage our use of AI to create both opportunities and business efficiencies across all functional aspects of the company, and we finished the quarter with $90 million of cash and $109 million of total liquidity. While, as I said, there were significant headwinds, despite that, there were also some significant bright spots. Our Digital Marketing Services business continues to significantly outperform the market, driven by strong sales execution and additional investments in the business.
This revenue stream’s 34% year-over-year growth in the quarter represents the third straight quarter of above 30% growth, reflecting both growth in new accounts, up 88%, as well as higher campaign order size, up 8%. These results continue to underscore the efficacy of our digital DMS sales strategy and our ability to seamlessly leverage our tens of thousands of client relationships to sell a curated set of Digital Marketing Services products in combination with our owned broadcasting and digital audio audiences. Our competitiveness is further reinforced by the fact that our DMS solutions deliver ROI for our clients that outperform industry benchmarks by an average of more than 25%. This performance has also helped to fuel our success in upselling existing radio customers as we have nearly doubled the percentage of our legacy customers who also buy DMS, driven by targeted investments in sales resources and capabilities.
We remain very bullish about the prospects for this business and the strong returns we expect from our continued investment in DMS. Our other digital businesses, which include Streaming and the Cumulus Podcast Network, also continue to perform well, normalizing for The Daily Wire and Dan Bongino comparisons. Year over year, Podcasting was up 15%, and with that same normalization and including our 34% year over year DMS growth, total digital revenue for the quarter was up over 8%. We continue to refine our slate of personality-driven podcasts. Just this month, we announced the launch of The Next Role with former NFL star and Super Bowl champion turned actor and producer Vernon Davis, as well as Family Matters with CJ Pearson, a nationally recognized Gen Z conservative commentator and activist who was recently named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people online in 2025.
Moving to broadcast advertising, headwinds continued to meaningfully impact both our spot and network business. That said, this quarter we once again gained total revenue market share in the markets in which we compete, reflecting, among other things, our ongoing focus on live and local programming, which we view as an area of key differentiation in today’s fragmented media environment. We believe that strong relationships created by our trusted on-air personalities help build enduring audiences and loyal advertising customers. As evidenced in Dallas, our largest market, where we gained almost 4 points of market share this quarter, driven by The Ticket, our dominant local sports talk station. Of note, our outperformance in Dallas was particularly outsized in September, with total revenue up mid-single digits while our peers were down almost 10%.
From a national perspective, the weak overall national advertising environment continued to have a large impact on our network business. While we benefited from the start of the NFL season, given the relatively strong demand for live sports, the extremely depressed general market environment drove total network revenue down 27%. In that context, normalizing to the loss of The Daily Wire, Dan Bongino, and unprofitable contracts that we terminated this year, we still gained market share year to date and in the third quarter as network revenue was compressed. We took swift action over the last several quarters, making significant cost reductions, renegotiating contracts, re-engineering the way we are structured and how we go to market, and positioning ourselves to have a more flexible cost structure in the future.
Additionally, given the relative resilience in sports demand, we were pleased to announce last week that we will be launching the Westwood One Sports 24/7 Network at the turn of the year. This network will be anchored by popular existing dayparts like The Jim Rome Show and You Better You Bet along with new shows that we are currently developing. The strategy is underpinned by the strong consumer brand recognition of Westwood One Sports and provides a pathway for revenue growth from new digital distribution and monetization rights. Given the infrastructure that we already have in place, the network would be launched in a way that actually reduces our overall costs. Looking ahead to Q4, we are largely seeing a continuation of Q3 trends with total revenue pacing down mid single digits when excluding the impact of Political, The Daily Wire, and Dan Bongino.
Including those impacts, we are pacing down mid to high teens. This is partially offset by the strength in our local Digital Marketing Services business given that broadcast radio backdrop. While we continue to invest in digital growth as inarguably best-in-class cost cutters, we also remained highly focused on re-engineering. During the third quarter, we cut $7 million of annualized net fixed costs through a combination of outsourcing of our traffic function and contract negotiations and terminations and have ramped up our efforts to identify and implement a wide array of AI-driven projects to drive further efficiencies and enhance growth. As mentioned last quarter, we have more than 100 different project ideas that have now been prioritized for execution and many are in the early stages of implementation.
These include building agents for sales prospecting and category lead generation, replacing certain customer service functions with chatbots to accelerate response time, and leveraging AI to clip and redistribute play-by-play games in near real time to increase the engagement with and reach of our content. We remain excited about the long-term value that executing the full breadth of these opportunities can unlock. Moving to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $90 million of cash. We also expect to complete the sale of our Nashville property for $10.5 million and receive approximately $2 million of proceeds for land in New Mexico associated with property we sold in 2020 as part of the Tower Portfolio transaction. Under the 2020 agreement, we have a right to 50% of net proceeds from land subsequently sold. We anticipate receiving the cash for both transactions in the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, we continue to work on several other non-core asset sales whose closings are being pushed into next year as a result of the FCC approval delays because of government shutdown.
While we do not expect secular headwinds to abate in the short term, we do believe we will continue to outperform our peers in the areas we can control by continuing to execute our strategies to further leverage the company’s core competencies and valuable underlying assets, which include our massive megaphone that reaches 92% of the country and 250 million listeners every month, our ability to walk product into the door as delivered by our almost 500 locally embedded sales professionals, our established relationships with approximately 30,000 local and national businesses who are natural customers for new products we develop, our multi-platform content engine creates monetizable content in an almost endless variety of formats, and our extensive, constantly growing library of premium audio content that can be redeployed and monetized in multiple ways.
Before I turn the call over to Frank, I want to acknowledge the litigation we recently filed against Nielsen. We feel strongly about the merits of our claim and we look forward to arguing the case in court. As for timing, we are operating under an expedited discovery schedule with a preliminary injunction hearing to be held in early December. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Frank.
Conference Call Moderator: Frank.
Operator: Thank you, Mary. In the quarter, total revenue was down 11.5% or 5.7%, excluding the impact of Political, The Daily Wire, and The Dan Bongino Show. EBITDA for the quarter was $16.7 million. Digital revenue was up 8% excluding the impact of the loss of The Daily Wire and Dan Bongino, with our Digital Marketing Services business continuing its strong growth trajectory, up 34% in the quarter. From a broadcast category perspective, travel, auto supplies, and home products were our best performing categories in spot, and pharma, food and beverage, and retail were some of our best in the network. Moving to expenses, during the quarter we executed $7 million of annualized fixed cost reductions, bringing year-to-date savings of $22.0 million and more than $18.2 million of fixed cost reductions since 2019, over 30% of the 2019 fixed cost base.
On an as-reported basis, total operating expenses in the quarter decreased by approximately $12 million year over year. Moving to our three expense lines, the decrease in content expense was primarily related to lower revenue share costs and decreased personnel expense. On SG&A expenses, these were flat as cost reductions primarily associated with lower headcount and facility expense were offset by an increase in trade expense, and on corporate expense, the increase was primarily driven by $8 million of royalty settlements with ASCAP and BMI and increased restructuring expenses related to cost actions that we took earlier in the year. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $90 million of cash, $109 million of liquidity, debt of maturity of $697 million, and net debt of $607 million.
When excluding the $27 million principal debt reduction resulting from the 2024 exchange offer, CapEx for the quarter was $4.4 million, with full year CapEx still expected to be below the $22.59 million mentioned on our last call. Additionally, we received proceeds of approximately $500,000 from asset dispositions during the quarter and expect to receive another net $12 million of proceeds from the sale of property in Nashville and New Mexico, which Mary mentioned earlier. Looking ahead, ex-political, ex-Daily Wire, and net of the impact of Bongino, we’re currently pacing down approximately mid-single digits, and including those impacts, down mid to high teens. As a reminder, in Q4 2024 we had total political revenue of $10.1 million. With that, I’ll turn the call back over to Mary for closing remarks.
Mary Berner, President and CEO, Cumulus Media: Thank you all for joining us today, and if you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to reach out to us directly. We will make ourselves available for a call. Have a great day, and we’ll speak to you again next time.
Conference Call Moderator: This concludes today’s conference call.
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