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SCA enters voluntary trading suspension

Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) has become the second media business to enter a voluntary suspension, following its trading halt earlier this week.

The business announced to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) this morning that trading would be suspended until Friday 3 April.

The statement read: “SCA advises that the voluntary suspension is necessary to enable SCA to continue to assess the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on its business and to make an announcement to inform the market about those impacts and the actions being taken by SCA to address them.”

Ooh Media also entered voluntary suspension earlier this week. It is currently examining capital raising options to move through the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

SCA embarked on a big cost-saving exercise in 2019, pushing through several rounds of redundancies and changes to its broadcast services.

Speaking to Mumbrella after SCA’s financial results in February, CEO Grant Blackley was fairly positive, saying he was confident the business had transformation on the horizon.

“You will hear from us in the next six months with a couple of products that we will launch which we’re very excited about. It was less than three years that we went into podcasting, we deployed $5.2m worth of capital into Podcast One and what you’ve seen is a market-leading product that is going from strength to strength,” he said.

The business was confident in its ability to bounce back from the bushfire crisis which hit Australia hard at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. Since then, the coronavirus outbreak has ravaged the ASX and already caused rounds of redundancies and the closures of several businesses.

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