Nine Entertainment has a new contestant in its game of corporate leadership: It’s Matt Stanton, who – having just been appointed chief executive after leading the group in an acting role for the past six months – now gets to pit his skills at saving or even growing the country’s largest media company.
Running Nine is no mean feat. It is a company with assets – particularly traditional broadcast television – that are structurally challenged, whose businesses are competing for revenue against the giant new media platforms like Google, Facebook and TikTok or streamers like Netflix, and whose fortunes rise and fall with the broader advertising market.
As Stanton put it on Thursday: “The external environment for all media companies is tough”.
Matt Stanton has landed the job running Nine Entertainment,Credit: Max Mason-Hubers
The prize money is big if he gets it right. If he hits the earnings jackpot, he could make $6 million a year. That’s rich pickings for running a company capitalised at about $2.5 billion.
His two predecessors, Mike Sneesby and Hugh Marks, made strides, but neither left in a blaze of glory. Marks engineered Nine’s merger with publisher Fairfax, which included this masthead, while Sneesby created and grew its streaming platform, Stan.
At least one major element of Stanton’s legacy will be decided in his first few months on the job. It’s the decision whether to sell or retain Nine’s 60 per cent shareholding in real estate portal Domain – a company capitalised at $2.7 billion that has a larger sharemarket value than Nine itself.
If the barometer of success were purely the share price, Marks would be a winner. But for all the promises of synergies and benefits of cross-fertilisation hailed during the merger of newspaper publisher Fairfax and TV broadcaster Nine more than six years ago, the silos still operate quite independently.
In many respects, the success of any Nine chief executive is determined by the strength or weakness of the broader advertising market – or, in the case of Domain – by the housing market.
The decision on Domain’s future is particularly important because the cash from a sale would provide Nine with options. If part of that is used to pay down debt, it would give the company a robust balance sheet to weather external economic shocks.
