Mystery still surrounds Global Radio sale

VIEWPOINT: The answer to one of the biggest questions in the radio industry at the moment remains a mystery, as our Podcast guests discuss this week.

The question: “Who will buy the radio stations which Global Radio have been told to sell?”, remains wide open.

The biggest commercial radio operator in the UK has been told to sell at least seven radio stations.

The Competition Commission has given Global Radio a choice of at least two station to sell in the East Midlands; Cardiff; North Wales; Greater Manchester & the North-West; the North-East; the South and West of Yorkshire; and Central Scotland.

The answer may not have even been worked out within Global Radio’s Leicester Square HQ, so trying to guess the outcome is proving difficult.

Our guests this week have been speaking to Trevor Dann to try and work it out.

Moz Dee, former talkSPORT boss and now running production and content company ContentEd, said: “I think a lot of people believe it was already a done deal.

“Now what we’ve got is a bunch of radio stations nobody wants, in a market which doesn’t make money, and I don’t think it benefits the radio industry at all.

“I think it was the wrong decision in the end.”

Steve Ackerman, MD of Something Else comments: “Anything in business is about making money and if you end up making a loss, something has gone wrong somewhere, and clearly this wasn’t in the plan for Global.

“What I don’t understand is, from the statagists who would have been working on this deal before it was done, how some element of this wasn’t foreseen?”

James Cridland, Managing Director of MediaUK says a warehousing option is the most obvious choice but doesn’t think the rumoured deals with international operators are likely: “When you talk to certain people within places like NRJ or Clear Channel, then, they just point at the fact that Clear Channel has so much debt anyway so therefore they’re not interested, and at NRJ, it certainly wasn’t on their radar when I was talking to them a couple of weeks ago.”

Global Radio has until the end of July to let the Competition Commission know which stations they propose to sell, which will be followed by the CC approving any deals once a buyer or buyers are found.

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