Mr. Kern’s guest
lecture on Inter Media and his explanation of private equity within the media
investment sector presented an incredibly intellectual, engaging discussion.
Throughout the discussion Mr. Kern provided an insightful look into the private
equity business and how he invest, flips and sells off media companies over an
average of ten year period. What I was most surprised about during his lecture
was that he prefers to invest in stable, longstanding companies that have
simply hit a rough patch. Although it makes sense to make safe investments, I
was taken back by how Mr. Kern does not invest in more current business models
or emerging trends. I believe that the business of media is constantly
changing, which is what makes the media industry such a powerful field to work
in. I would think that investors would want to put their money towards emerging
trends that would hopefully catch fire and create a large return on investment.
One topic I wished Mr. Kern would have touched on was a mores specific breakdown
of an investment strategy and how he determines what companies to invest in,
where he allocates the invested funds and what key factor he looks for in every
company. Obviously as part of a private equity firm, Mr. Kern does not want to
give away his tactics but it would have been immensely helpful to simply give
examples of what different aspects many private equity firms like Inter Media
generally look for in a potential company. The most valuable piece of
information Mr. Kern provided during his lecture was that Google is losing
revenue, as more and more publishing companies are going digital. This means
that Google is losing out on potential content to provide or distribute in
their search engine due to exclusivity for the publishers. As a result, Google
decreases traffic to its website, advertisers see a fall out in traffic to
Google and thus advertisement revenue decreases.
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