Who, if anyone, could be next in the broader media and entertainment industry?
The global financial crisis has made debt harder to access and more expensive, leaving Wall Street wondering who might run into trouble — and even file for bankruptcy — in 2009. Besides newspaper companies, Charter Communications, the cable operator controlled by software billionaire Paul Allen, is high on people’s lists of concerns. The St. Louis-based company has long been the most indebted major cable firm, with net debt of slightly more than $21 billion as of Sept. 30, and it has said that it might need to go into bankruptcy to deal with that burden. President and CEO Neil Smit has focused on boosting revenue and operating cash flow, but to survive under its debt pile Charter has refinanced and extended its maturities every year since 2004. “Charter is surviving by using debt exchanges to push back maturities,” Gimme Credit analyst Shelly Lombard said in a recent report. “Even at the current revenue growth rate, Charter won’t be able to grow into its capital structure.” She predi
