Too bad the New York Times Co. couldn't always sell its daily newspaper the way it did on Nov. 5, the day after Barack Obama won the presidential election, when some people stood on lines wrapped around blocks to buy a copy. The Times announced that edition was in such demand it printed an additional 150,000 copies, which it continued to sell through the following weekend and through mail order. That upside anomaly in sales won't be enough to save the company, and executives at the New York-based media company and investors know it. After all, investors are abandoning the stock Friday as it hit a 52-week all-time low at $4.95 a share.
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One investor who might be grumbling is Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim Helú, the world's second-richest man, who is seeing the value of his 6.4% stake dwindle. When Slim first divulged his stake, Arturo Elías Ayub, Slim's son-in-law and the communications director of Slim's Carso Group, told the Financial Times: "The investment is purely financial. ... It's a great company, the price is cheap and it gives a good dividend." The only thing that seems to hold true to that statement these days is the price of the company's stock, which is heading south quickly.
To save money, the company said late Thursday that it would slash its quarterly dividend to 6 cents a share from 23 cents. The founding Ochs-Sulzberger family's trust said in a statement that
"while [the decision was] very difficult for all shareholders, it is the appropriate and prudent business response given the extraordinary challenges of the current economic environment." - Gerald Magpily
See MarketWatch article
See Financial Times article
