short candidate

Thinking this should be easy money shorting NEC. Reasons being:

1) Linear TV is going the route of Blockbuster and Kodak. Ask anyone under 30 the last time they watched Channel 9. You'll hear crickets. Once you've experienced the freedom of on demand ad free programming, linear TV seems like a backward concept. It's only the older generation still watching free to air TV, and over the long term they will clearly be an irrelevant audience base. That's 1.4b of revenue and 400m of EBITDA that'll swing to losses over time.

2) Newspapers are also a dying medium. Again no one under 30 are buying physical papers and reading them. When the newspaper readership inevitably dries up, the lucrative advertising revenue also disappears. Online paywalled versions of their papers, copyright link and SMH can easily be bypassed with a browser extension, or pirated by going to a site like 12ft, which carries all the stories from major papers free of charge.

3) Stan is subscale and will be crushed by Netflix or even Paramount Plus over time. There's not enough new content on Stan to keep subscribers interested, and they can't grow audiences significantly without new content. They're stuck in a stagnant loop. Live sports like the tennis won't save them, not when they're charging $32 minimum for base Stan + sports add on package, when you can just use ESPN+ with a VPN for $US9.99 for the same tennis.

4) Domain - lags behind Realestate consistently in terms of number of properties listed. Sky high PE ratio. Not cheap by any means.

In short, NEC seems like a collection of 3 irreversibly dying assets, and one overpriced one.

Keen to hear other thoughts on this.