Southern Cross Austereo is transparently open for offers. It’s surprising, given that CEO and managing director John Kelly spent most of his first year at the company dealing with an overly complicated takeover bid from its main competitor ARN that fell apart after eight months of stalled negotiations.

Now, with reports that Nine and SCA have been in takeover talks, Kelly told Mumbrella he “won’t comment on any particular speculation” from the weekend’s papers, but is clearly open to the concept.

“For some time, myself and the board have commented that we believe that media consolidation is required in Australia,” he said.

“On this transformation journey, our objective has been to be the best possible audio company in Australia, with very much a digital forward focus with the Listnr ecosystem.

“We believe we now are clearly the best audio company in Australia. And, if that means that there’s consolidation afoot in due course, then clearly we’ll consider that – because we think that is an important part of the opportunities for our network and our people moving forward.

“So, we’ll see what happens. I think we continue to absolutely focus on our own business.

“But really, we’re mindful that consolidation may happen in the future.”

John Kelly, SCA’s managing director and CEO

SCA knows it’s a good deal at the moment, and warned its shareholders of this in its full-year results, filed on Monday morning.

“Investment markets undervalue SCA’s business, especially as it transitions from its legacy broadcast operations to high growth digital audio operations,” it noted, under possible ‘risks’.

“Despite the improvement in performance of the company, in the opinion of the directors, SCA’s share price does not reflect the underlying value of the company.”

The market is moving quickly to correct the undervaluation. On Monday morning before the market opened, the company’s market capitalisation was sitting at $157 million. By the close of business, it was over $200 million.

If Nine had made an offer on Sunday, the numbers would already be out of date.

“The market reaction has been very strong to our results,” Kelly told Mumbrella, moments after hopping off Monday morning’s investor call, where he informed shareholders that SCA’s net profits after tax had tripled in FY25. At this point, stocks had jumped by around 18%, and were sitting at $189 million.

“We’ve given a lot of guidance over the last little........

© Mumbrella