Yeah they will definitely have a lot of options moving forward....

Yeah they will definitely have a lot of options moving forward. The new deadline for the property sale is 23 August - and they would have already been working closely with whoever is going to buy the property. So I don't think there is much left to negotiate etc and the deal should be done by the deadline.

It will be interesting to see if they provide any commentary a couple of days later when the FY results are released.

But, as you say, unless they somehow do something monumentally stupid with the money - things should look bright for the future prospects.

Ideally the money can be used by hitting the growth accelerator pedal hard. That will only materialise from some kind of acquisition imo. NZME reminds me of Sky in a lot of ways - generous FCF (way above GAAP earnings), large audience and subscriber base...investing in digital services for growth...no longer fearful of cannibalising their traditional services. Unloved by the market because the sustained view is that competition has killed the business (OTT services in the case of Sky...Google, Facebook, Tiktok etc for NZME). No idea whether Sky see any value here, but the prospect of merging is not completely lunatic I don't think. Revenue would leap over $1B and FCF would probably sit between $80M-$100M while Sky is still investing in the new STB etc.

Ultimately, I still think it is inevitable for Sky to become a telco. Telco services become the platform for large growth. However, if some kind of a deal with Vocus or 2D was likely, it would have happened by now. So I think we can safely rule that out, for now.

If no deals are possible with any complimentary service provider then is has to be buybacks this year and resumption of divvys next year I think. This option does not help Sky grow as a business whatsoever, but does return capital to shareholders (who have not been paid anything since 15 March 2019). They could buy back 500M - 700M shares at the current price (depending how much capital they commit to it).

If the shares outstanding dropped to 1B - 1.2B then a starting dividend of 30M the following year would be 2.5c-3c per share. Even a whopping 10% yield would pus the SP to 25c-30c per share.

Once the investing is done and normal FCF returns, that dividend has the potential to increase...and one would expect a corresponding SP increase.

If this is the worst case scenario, then I think those who are patient will be rewarded.