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180 Degree Capital Corp: comScore (SCOR) is a Case Study Of a Plummeting Stock Price Without Any Apparent Cause

Soumya Eswaran
·4-min read

180 Degree Capital Corp., an investment management firm, recently released its first quarter 2024 investor letter.  A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In March, despite the market sell-off, the fund achieved a +4.7% gross total return from its cash and public-related securities, leading to a 2.8% gain in the NAV to $5.16. The firm believes that the economy will continue to show resilience, and its portfolio companies do not require lower rates to create value for shareholders. They benefit from positive economic trends and activism across many holdings. For more information on the fund’s top picks in 2024, please check its top five holdings.

180 Degree Capital Corp. highlighted stocks like ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR), in the first quarter 2024 investor letter. ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) is an information and analytics company. The one-month return of ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) was -0.52%, and its shares lost 22.90% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On May 28, 2024, ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) stock closed at $13.48 per share with a market capitalization of $67.083 million.

180 Degree Capital Corp. stated the following regarding ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter:

"ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR): SCOR again missed top-line estimates and exceeded EBITDA targets for Q4 2023. SCOR then provided guidance for 2024 that indicated expected revenue growth, but not the ability to maintain or exceed 15% EBITDA margins for the year. SCOR also was unable to reach a conclusion on the outstanding negotiations with Charter to resolve data licensing issues and with the preferred stockholders to resolve outstanding capital structure issues.

180 nominated Matt McLaughlin, the former COO of DoubleVerify Holdings, Inc., as a board nominee at the 2024 Annual Meeting and planned to run a competitive proxy contest. After several members of the Board met with Matt, SCOR decided to support Matt’s addition to SCOR’s Board through an expansion of the Board to 11 members without us needing to run a competitive proxy contest. While this is a smart first step for SCOR’s Board, it has painfully failed to address substantial overhangs to the creation of value for common stockholders including SCOR’s capital structure and Charter’s inherent conflicts of interest. From our vantage point, we do not know if the Board is unable to agree on a path, or too lazy to understand the urgency in getting to some conclusion. Either way, it doesn’t matter. SCOR’s Board is ineffective and has overseen a decline in SCOR’s common stock price by 80% since they arrived. They need to wake up and take action.

SCOR is another case study in terms of a stock price being obliterated without real news as the source of such destruction. As we stated previously, SCOR had the same capital structure three years ago when its stock traded at $5.00, and its EBITDA was $32 million. EBITDA in 2023 was $44 million. The consensus analyst estimates according to Bloomberg for 2024 is $51.1 million and $56.2 million for 2025. The obsession of stockholders and otherwise would be stockholders with the unknown intentions of the preferred stockholders is the only thing anyone talks about these days instead of the meaningful progress the current management team has made in fixing the business and building cross-platform products that customers want and need. We will not go away as we believe there is so much hidden value to be unlocked if the Board gets some urgency.

For the quarter, SCOR decreased by $0.05/share, or $0.5 million."

A video engineer working with advanced technological tools to analyze data from various platforms.

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ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) is not on our list of 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 6 hedge fund portfolios held ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) at the end of the first quarter which was 6 in the previous quarter.

As anticipated, ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) saw a decline in Q1 revenues compared to the prior year quarter. First-quarter revenue was $86.8 million, a 5.2% decrease from $91.6 million in the same quarter last year.

In another article, we discussed ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) and shared 180 Degree Capital Corp.'s views on the company in the previous quarter. In addition, please check out our hedge fund investor letters Q1 2024 page for more investor letters from hedge funds and other leading investors.

If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as Microsoft but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: Michael Burry Is Selling These Stocks and A New Dawn Is Coming to US Stocks.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.