Matt Deegan

XFM News

More from the ever changing strategy at GCap as they announce that they're not going to be selling XFM Manchester and XFM Scotland after all. Apparently they've decided that they're decent assets to hold after all. I'm sure it's also nothing to do with the fact that they couldn't get decent price for those stations.

They may of course have got a decent price had they not announced that they'd be 'giving back' the licence to Ofcom if they couldn't find a bidder. Valuing the stations yourself at zero is never very good to encourage high cash bids.

The odd thing is they still plan to sell XFM South Wales. This must mean that there's a decent price on offer for it. I think it's another crazy decision. The station is new and relatively inexpensive to run, especially as it's co-located with Red Dragon. If they can't make money out of it, then it raises more questions about their national/local sales skills than the viability of the licence. Especially with Ofcom's recent relaxation of programming rules they'd only have to wait 18 months to do a 'Global' and network everything except Breakfast and Drive. It seems the GCap craziness hasn't stopped yet!

2 comments

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  1. Craig W ·

    I think it's a barmy decision to sell South Wales given that, at the moment, it's the strongest sounding station of the network. Add this to the fact that there is a real appetite for it here and you've got to wonder why they would offload it - as you say, there's probably a decent set of offers on the table for it and thus they wish to cash it in.

    Such a shame.

  2. Ian Devlin ·

    Surprised that South Wales is the one to be sold, the station has only been running for 5 months and has GLC members on drive who are pretty good. There's also a decent size market for X in Wales though IMHO Kerrang would have suited the market better.

    It just makes a mockery of the OFCOM licensing process if a station is awarded a 12 year license and their parent company decide to sell it less than 6 months after launch.