This morning, WWE CFO and Chief Strategy Officer George Barrios spoke at the
Deutsche Bank 23rd Annual Media, Internet and Telecom Conference in Palm Beach Florida.
A replay of the audio webcast is
available here.
In terms of ground-breaking announcements, there really wasn't any.
As usual, the program began with Barrios walking through the
latest version of the Investor Presentation. As always, he highlights that WWE is a "powerful global brand" with "multiple growth drivers". In particular, here are their important achievements:
(Barrios sounded exhausted on the call. Perhaps this was because the conference was in Florida and not in the greater NYC area. Either way, he seemed off his game as evidenced by things such as when he
flubbed a line about WWE mobile gaming and talked about "
WWE Scorecard" instead of "
WWE Supercard".)
Barrios' message is almost always the same. He sells the "big five" for WWE. Those are:
- Powerful Global Brand
- Strong Competitive Position
- Content Rich Company
- Large Addressable Market
- Attractive Financial Profile
TV
Regarding the
TV agreements, Barrios did note that the top seven deals (US/UK/India/Canada/Mexico/Thailand/UAE) represented about 130 million dollars in existing TV Rights while the remaining 30 deals represented the final 47 million in existing TV Rights. His point was that "no single remaining deal has major value". When someone asked about whether they expected to stay with the same partners or engage in competitive bidding, Barrios noted that they stayed with their same partners for largest three deals (US/U.K./India) while in the case of
Mexico, they did move to a new partner with Fox Sports Latin America.
Someone asked whether launching the WWE Network had any effect on the TV negotiations. At first Barrios tried to ignore the question just saying that "deals are behind us". When pressed for further comment, he just said that he "couldn't put words in their mouths. There wasn't a lot of discussion about it."
That's an interesting perspective and one that runs counter to what
CEO Vince McMahon has publicly stated. In May 2014, right after the new NBCU deal was signed, Vince said on a conference call that he was "little disappointed" and that launching the WWE Network in February before they completed the domestic TV deal "definitely had a negative impact".
WWE NETWORK
Of course, WWE is very proud of their over-the-top service. It's pretty much how and why they've started attending all of these conferences.
This was a graph they showed in the presentation, but it's a bit misleading. The 2014 numbers represent the number of paid subscribers at the end of the quarters (along with the
post-WrestleMania number of 667,287). However, the 2015 number is a
million subscribers (technically
1,000,648) but does not necessarily represent a "paid subscriber" number.
It's almost inevitable that Q1 2015 will average more than a million subscribers. But between a free month in February for new subscribers, the UK launch in early January (with
extended-cancellation protections for "cooling-off period" and online forms), #cancelwwenetwork movements and anticipated WrestleMania swell, it's tough to know what the real number of WWE Network subscribers is.
Barrios did announce that WWE is expecting to launch WWE Network on "some new Smart TVs" this year.
WWE continues to push the narrative that the long-term goal for the WWE Network is 3-4 millions subscribers. What's their short-term goal? As usual, Barrios refused to give specifics. "We're not making any calls."
While WWE insists that they're going to announce WWE Network plans for "Italy, Germany, Japan, India, China, Thailand and Malaysia" this list of countries underlines two important points:
a) There's not many new geographies left for WWE to expand into. They already did the Domestic (February 2014), and International Launches (August 2014) and the U.K. Launch (January 2015).
b) It's highly questionable if WWE is really going to launch the WWE Netweork in a country such as China (strict censorship) or India (TV rights were quite valuable and may not want to upset their partner Ten Sports).
WWE continues to push the idea that there are hundreds of millions of households with "affinity for WWE" across the globe. This "tremendous appetite for WWE content" remains a popular talking point for the company, but a completely unproven strategy. For instance, while WWE estimates there are 10 million WWE broadband homes in France and United Kingdom. However, France ranked #10 behind Chile, New Zealand, Ukraine, Mexico and Brazil for actual WWE Network subscribers according to
an infogram that WWE produced. UK was #2. It seems that we're not really looking at apples-to-apples.
INDIA
Barrios new favorite pitch is what I've termed his "India is the Future" speech.
The
new TV deal in India for WWE is the third largest for individual television rights. Barrios noted that right now the monetization from the Indian market is "nearly 100% television rights" but he believes there is a big opportunity for WWE merchandising in that country.
While India boasts a large population and robust economy, broadband penetration is relatively low. However, Barrios notes that there's increasing mobile usage which often includes unique "
download to go" features for Indian YouTube where a user can essentially go to an internet cafe, download videos and watch them later on their device while they are offline. Whether that sort of solution would work for WWE Network launch is completely unknown but that seems to be part of Barrios' India pitch.
How does WWE play overseas? Barrios said that "universal themes travel pretty well. Good. Bad."
MISC
As usual, the questions from the audience weren't that tough and Barrios sidestepped many of them. He was asked about social media, and how the company is planning to monetize the segment. Instead, he talked about YouTube and how revenue from YT has grown from "few hundred thousand dollars to few million dollars". That's all well and fine, but it absolutely ignores the real questions - does all of those Twitter followers and Nielsen Trending metrics really relate to any evidence that WWE is becoming more popular?
When he was asked about the fanbase demographics in the United States, Barrios said that they have "multi-generational viewing" and that means they "re-generate their fanbase".
In terms of the expensive investment from launching the WWE Network, Barrios insisted that they "have made the pivot" and that since 2014 was the all-time record for Revenue, the company is past the inflection point.
When someone from the audience noted that, "Particularly good plots have spiked business." He wondered if "Anything may drastically increase the viewership?" Barrios just said that since they produce 52 weeks of content each year, things are going to naturally ebb & flow. Furthermore, "We have a lot talented writers.Vince is a key part of that. Paul Levesque is key part of that. They assure me it's just gonna get better."
In general, the audience didn't know that much about wrestling. Someone said, "I don't know when the Royal Rumble was. Was the one million number announced after that?" There was an odd discussion whether Barrios tried to explain that only the PPVs go directly on the Network, Raw & SmackDown show up after the VOD blackout window (typically 30 days) and the other 230 live events are not televised. Someone else tried to point out that there was only a few marque events - Royal Rumble, SummerSlam, WrestleMania, Survivor Series. (Barrios' favorite word is calling them "tentpoles".) However, Barrios shot back, "We have 12 events a year!" Obviously, this avoids the real conversation about how big of a decline in subscribers should WWE expect after WrestleMania.
In closing, enjoy the Barrios Bingo Card.
