Dallas, Texas 07/07/2015 (Financialstrend) – TheStreet, Inc. (NASDAQ:TST), the financial publication company founded by high-profile TV presenter Jim Cramer continued its weak run at the stock markets on Monday. The $65.2 Million market cap company appeared to have a lost much investor interest with share prices falling further.
Despite a strong media presence and following, the share prices remain capped. Although the financial performance of the company remains solid, and its long term growth plans remain focused along with high dividend yield, it remains troubled by controversial activist investors.
TheStreet, Inc. (NASDAQ:TST) activist investor Carlo Cannell has since December, called for Cramer to focus on TST and quit his TV presentations. Cannell’s colorful vocabulary made interesting media, while the performance of the stock remained largely unaffected, in the initial stages, by the investor’s colorful umbrage.
While the activist campaign has remained confusing, the issues that appear to be troubling the digital media house is its cash balance and lack of high dividend yield.
TheStreet, Inc. (NASDAQ:TST) has been successful with its long term strategy, thus far. In the first quarter of the financial year, the acquisition of BoardEx, a ‘relationship capital’ management was fruitful. Earlier acquisitions include DealFlow in 2013, besides The Deal in 2012.
The acquisition at $22 million in 2014 has yielded roughly 10 times, following an EBITDA filing of $500,000 by BoardEx. Though the just-acquired publication continued to show marginal growth in subscriptions, it does appear to have certain issues on hand, such as drop in revenues in comparison to previous years’ earnings.
TheStreet, Inc. (NASDAQ:TST) interest in BoardEx, at the time of acquisition was the ‘ability to cross-sell’ its products and services such as The Deal to institutional clients. However, the nearly-flat subscription along with drop in revenues, does not bode good for TST nor BoardEx . For TST the need of the hour is to change the technology platform from which it delivers its digital content and subscription-based business model. As the world aligns with mobile-based programmed buying, BoardEx provided a stepping stone to shift gears to publishing of tomorrow.
