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Friday, June 19, 2009

The Nation is in Deep Financial Doo Doo




The Nation is in really dire financial straits.

Serious cash flow problem.

It is basically borrowing to stay afloat at this point.

It has no assets to leverage--except an over-inflated inventory.

It lost 60 million baht in the last quarter.

Its sales revenues declined by 24% in one quarter.

Earnings per share (.36)

What I find laughable is that it actually increased its value of "goodwill."

It owes 800 million baht in short-term loans.

I guess the publishers at The Nation haven't been reading Thanong's lectures on sufficiency economy.

Guess what? Things are only going to get worse.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems they are going down a hole. Couldnt happen to nicer people.

In my reader experience, the Nation is an awful rag that bends truth out of shape, ignores important news and generally acts as a bum-boy for the elites in bangkok.

As a former advertiser, they are almost completely incompetent and cant perform the simplest task with any kind of reliability. They are also arrogant and resent/ignore justified complaints about their incompetence. I speak from experience here; several moths ago I spoke with their president about the constant fuck-ups with my corporate advertising. He told me he regretfully could not promise to improve the situation and advised me to advertise with the Bangkok Post instead. True story.

So going down a hole is really no more than they deserve. Along with many other Thai fuck-ups, they shouldnt really be in business and they wouldnt be if they had to pay staff at the level western business does.

Rich

Fonzi said...

Rich-

Disgusting that they told a corporate account to bugger off.

I guess they think they can make up the cash flow from their adsense on the website.

Anonymous said...

By an extraordinary coincidence I spoke to someone today who had s similar experience with the American VP for advertising last year. Told him the Naation didnt want or need his money (I think he complained about speaking to 15 people in the advertising dept. - nobody seemed to understand what "I want to buy some advertising in your paper" meant).

I suspect it is a corporate culture thing.

By the way. I see that more than 10% of the senate and 85 MPs are under investigation for assets concealment or something. I mean WTF? What kind of a show are they running over there? It sounds like comedy hour. Or amateur hour.

Seems odd that Thais take themselves so very seriously really...

Rich

elixer said...

It owes 800,000 thousand baht (or 800 million baht) in short-term loans.

Fonzi said...

Elixir-

Thanks, that was a typo. It was meant to be 800 million baht.

Steve said...

Rich - your first two paragraphs (first comment) sum up my feelings exactly. Your anecdote that follows surprises me not at all.