Nielsen Holdings N.V.'s third-quarter profit rose 28% as the
consumer-research company's two main segments posted stronger revenue.
Nielsen provides data ranging from what people watch on
television to what they buy in stores. The company's profits have generally
improved, as growth in emerging markets helped demand for its data and analysis
on what consumers buy and watch.
For the latest quarter, Nielsen reported a profit of $134
million, or 35 cents a share, up from $105 million, or 29 cents a share, a year
earlier. Stripping out stock-based compensation and other items, per-share
earnings rose to 50 cents from 44 cents.
Revenue grew 2.7% to $1.39 billion.
Asked about potential revenue opportunities with the
integration of Arbitron at Nielsen, CEO David L. Calhoun said integration is going smoothly telling Wednesday’s conference call that “when we started the integration of our
company back in '07, we have been integrating companies literally since Day 1,
so we're pretty schooled at it. So on Day 1 at Arbitron, we have a plan,
literally by function and by operation, a plan for really almost complete
integration with the Nielsen company.”
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| David Calhoun |
He added, “the headquarters stuff is easy, because you don't
need 2 headquarters. The functional support stuff is relatively
straightforward, because you only need one accounts payable processing. You
only need one receivables. The fit with this company, I've said this many
times, is really relative to the 35 we did before this, is probably better than
any of those. And so we're just going to march down that path. And like I said,
I'm confident that we can express big synergies quickly, because I know that
path and we're on it. I don't think I need to get a whole lot more specific
than that. We dealt with the brand issue right out of the chute, so everyone
knows it's Nielsen Audio. We have had real good support out of the marketplace
for that move. And then on the revenue side, I think our client base, what they
want more than anything from Nielsen is they want to marry their audience
measurement with retail data so that they can begin to go to the marketplace
and demonstrate the effectiveness of the medium against all other mediums.”
Calhoun also said Nielsen believes that radio is a more
vibrant medium than the way the world perceives it.
“And it's mostly built
around its local characteristics and its proximity to everything retail. So it
actually is, it's 2 hours of a consumer's day. Most of it's in a car, and most
of it is in close proximity to retail. And so of all the mediums that should
benefit from that, this one should be significant. So our job is to go out and
demonstrate with what kind of retailers, with what kind of consumers does it,
in fact, have an impact and then can we begin to educate advertisers as to what
that impact is so that they can include it in their media mix models and other
forms of resource allocation models that they do,” according to Calhoun.
