The market seemed pleasantly surprised by the Sirius quarterly report. But, it is now clear that it will be almost impossible for the company to hit its year-end subscriber targets.Sirius has 5.1 million subscribers after adding 441,000 in the third quarter. The company’s year-end goal is 6.2 million.Sirius rival XM Satellite Radio has already dropped its year-end subscriber forecast and added only added only 286,000 new subsribers in Q3.But, the signal out of Wall St. is still that theses companies are in trouble, saddled by huge debts of over $1 billion each, continued losses and slowing growth in their subscriber bases.Sirius now trades at $4.12, down from its 52-week high of $7.98 and its all-time high of almost $70. The numbers speak volumes. If Q3 was a good quarter, why has the stock barely moved in the last four months of trading.There a hundred reasons that satellite radio will not do well in the future. High definition radio makes the sound quality of tradion radio signals much better. Multimedia players like the iPod now have adapter for use in the car. In theory, a large WiMax network like the one that Sprint is building with Intel and Motorola could push music to WiMax-enable cars. With Cingular’s new technology, car phones will be able to play music.The problems is that there are now too many argument against the success of satellite radio. Only one of the alternates has to work to put a large dent in the Sirius model.Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
Sirius Is Still A Dog (SIRI)(XMSR)(AAPL)(INTC)(S)
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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