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Walmart's New Health Food Push: Is It Too Hard to Swallow?CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) needs hits and needs them now.
The company today reported lackluster first quarter results. Profit from continuing operations was $213.5 million on revenue of $3.66 million. Excluding one-time items, profit was 33 cents, beating the 32-cent average profit forecast and $3.61 million revenue forecast of analysts polled by Thomson Financial.
Operating income excluding some costs at the company's television business, its largest, fell 6% to $399 million, while revenue rose a mere 2% to $2.57 billion. As Bloomberg News points out ratings at the company's flagship network excluding sports are down 12% in the 18 to 49 year old demographic. Though CBS' "CSI" shows remain popular, the company is losing ground to ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" and Fox's "American Idol."
CBS Radio, the former home of shock jock Don Imus, also had a lousy quarter. Revenue fell 9% to $397.5 million and operating income fell 4% to $164.4 million. Though Imus was a star, his program accounted for less than 1% of the division's revenues, Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Michael Nathanson told Bloomberg News.
The only bright spot in the CBS lineup other than "Two and Half Men" was Simon & Schuster. The publishing unit saw revenue rise 27% to $229.3 million helped by higher sales of best-sellers. Profit was $23.8 million compared with $5.8 mi lion a year earlier.
If CBS's stock were a television program, it would have been canceled. The shares haven't done squat this year, increasing about 2%. Its former corporate sibling Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA) hasn't done much better.
Unless CBS is willing to take a chance on my sitcom script about a blogger who lives in the suburbs and fights crime on the weekends, I don't see how the company can dig itself out of its hole. Maybe someone can come up with a better program idea, but I kind of doubt it.
Seriously, CBS's stock is going to have all of the oomph of some its tired sitcoms for quite a while.
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