Am I the only one to be totally underwhelmed by yesterday's announcement from Trinity Mirror?
No sale of the regional papers (en bloc). No sale of the national title. No demerger. No real change in strategy. All this accompanied by an 8% decline in advertising revenues. Only the sports papers will hit the auction block as a coherent business unit.
Never in the course of human history has so much time and effort (and money, and consultants) been wasted on such a total lack of change.
As for exactly why some of the regional titles, such as those in the south-east, are up for sale, but others (including Scotland, which saw a 3% fall in circulation) are not, eludes me. Perhaps simply because they fit some region-shaped holes in some of the other regional players' portfolios?
And remember, all of the last year has been spent deciding whether to sell the papers.
Now Trinity Mirror has the difficult bit to do - actually selling them.
A PER of 9 and a yield of 4.4% is telling us something. And I suspect it's not that the shares are cheap. This could so easily get worse before it gets better.
By the way, there's one quite intriguing nugget in the numbers. While advertising as a whole was down 8%, recruitment advertising was down 13%. That does not look particularly healthy for the consumer economy - or for house prices - and particularly not for recruitment companies.
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