Condé CEO Townsend shoots down step down rumors
As the New Yorker gets ready to move into One World Trade Center later this month, completing the Condé Nast migration to downtown, rumors have been swirling inside the giant magazine publisher that once the move is done, CEO Charles Townsend will step down.
Townsend shot down that rumor in a wide-ranging interview with Media Ink on Thursday.
“Don’t count on it,” he said. “I am not going anywhere.”
Townsend, 70, signed a five-year contract several years ago and it has options to extend it, he said.
“My contract runs for 2¹/₂ years. It’s renewable. My health is good, and I love the business,” he said.
Looking ahead, the executive, CEO of Condé since 2004, said the company has no plans to launch any conventional print magazines this year — nor is he making any plans to shut any down.
The company is on the prowl for a big digital acquisition, he hinted.
“What we are really focusing on is a very solid digital acquisition strategy,” he said. “Businesses that can really help us grow in generating digital audiences or services to digital audiences.”
Andrew Siegel, a former Yahoo! executive who serves as the Newhouse family M&A chief, was armed with a $500 million war chest two years ago but still has the bulk of the cash unspent.
Said Townsend: “We have to be really focused on what we will do, but we have the wherewithal to do it.”
Asked if Condé made money, last year, he said, “Oh yeah, of course.”
One source said that the company missed its revenue target by over $100 million. Townsend would not comment on particulars other than to acknowledge it was a challenging year.
“Overall,” he acknowledged, “we’re not back to the revenues we enjoyed in the first decade of this century. We have brands that I wish were performing better. Anyone with deep involvement in the beauty business is really feeling their pain, but the fashion business is on fire, the auto business is coming back solidly, and the tech business is coming back solidly.”
One bright spot, digital revenues, outpaced other growth in 2014 and “approached 15 percent” of overall revenue.
“In 2015, [digital] should make a significant contribution — greater than 20 percent. We have huge audiences and they are very scaleable,” he said.
Townsend said that Condé Nast Entertainment, the video and digital-focused unit headed by Dawn Ostroff, “has been a runaway success” although he conceded it is still in the investment stage. “What digital business isn’t,” he shrugged.
“It is on the right road in creating digital video, we’re doing as well as any Web business can, and print is solid. Things are not bad.”
But he said for the past five years, the company has had to bear down and work harder.
“Since 2009, we have been operating under a dark cloud of one kind or another [on the economic front] — 2015 is the first year that will provide us with some sustainable relief.”