All about the cash: Why the Laundys bought Nine Radio

When Nine announced the sale of its radio network to the Laundy family on Friday, I must have read about 50 headlines describing the move as “surprising” and “linked to politics”.

But I think the story is more economic in nature: someone has spotted a cashflow stream that looks mispriced, and they are backing themselves to run it with fewer distractions.

Nine is selling 2GB, 3AW, 4BC, 6PR, 2UE, Magic1278 and 4BH to the Laundy Family Office for a cash and debt free enterprise value of $56 million. The same day, Nine also made a $850m bet on outdoor via QMS. Nine is reshaping its portfolio towards growth. But the Laundys are doing something simpler: buying a cash stream.

In this case, the price matters more than the medium

While Nine’s documentation says it expected radio to contribute $6m EBITDA in 2026, in past reports the number has been reported far higher. Reading between the lines, there could be some variance in the costs that make the EBITDA number more attractive to a private buyer.

In Nine’s H1 FY25 results, the “Total Audio” segment posted revenue of $53.6m and EBITDA of $5.7m for the half. Annualise that and you are looking at roughly $107m of revenue and about $11m to $12m of EBITDA, assuming the second half is roughly similar. That is a rough annualisation, but gives you the basic shape of the thing.

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Now compare that to the sale price. $56m for an asset that can plausibly produce $11m to $12m of EBITDA is roughly a 5x EBITDA multiple. Across media world, where everyone loves to tell you everything is in “structural decline”, a 5x multiple is the kind of number that gets private capital interested. It’s obviously not because they think radio is suddenly a growth rocket. It is because they think the public market and the markets have over-discounted the decline.

That’s what makes this deal work for both parties.

Looking back, Nine had valued the network at $275m seven years ago when it took full control of Macquarie Media. Today the price is $56m. That gap is not just “radio got worse”. It is also “public markets stopped paying for slow, messy, risky, talent-driven cashflows”. A family office does not need the market’s blessing. It needs the cash to arrive on time.

Why pubs and talk radio rhyme

To my mind, pubs and talk radio have a lot in common.

Both businesses basically live or die on habit.

A good pub is not a destination once a year. It is a place people return to without thinking. A good talk station is the same. Breakfast. Drive. The same voices. The same rhythms. The same callers. It’s not hot and flashy, but it is monetisable because it repeats well.

Talk radio also has a profile that looks a lot like a venue:

• High fixed costs, low marginal costs once the engine is running
• A product that is basically attention bundled with community
• Local advertisers who want reach and credibility more than “precision”

A pub group is full of local, repeated decisions. You are constantly trying to win Thursday night. You are constantly trying to turn an event into a packed room. You are constantly trying to make your venues feel like part of the community rather than a generic box that sells alcohol.

Talk radio is a distribution system for exactly that sort of story.

I don’t think that means the stations become one big ad channel for pubs. But I do think a hospitality owner has a built-in advantage in turning “community” into sponsorships, outside broadcasts, live reads, venue-linked events, and partnerships that a purely financial buyer might not even see or access. It might be the hospitality buyer is able to create “synergies” (the long fabled bullshit of most M&A deals) in a way that most can’t see in this deal.

Take, for example, the advertiser base. I can’t imagine well-heeled (TV?) ad sales people going to see a plumbing group or car dealership out in Newcastle (maybe I’m wrong here). But I can imagine hospitality groups speaking to these people to host their events, maybe working with them in other capacities, that makes them more naturally able to reach the profile of advertiser easily and quickly.

This is how the Laundys can get their money back in three years

Arthur Laundy, from an interview with Sam Hope

The real question I think most will ask from this is how do the Laundys get their money back. It’s a fair question. And if you buy the asset with all equity, a three-year payback is hard to justify. The maths is too slow.

Even if EBITDA is $11m to $12m a year, you do not get that all as free cash. You pay tax. You pay some capex. You carry working capital. You probably want to invest a bit in sales and digital audio. You might end up with something like $6m to $8m of free cashflow a year in a steady state. That is not a three-year payback on $56m. That is closer to seven to nine years, which is a hellishly long time for any investor.

So the three-year story only really works if you assume two things:

1. The buyer uses sensible leverage.
2. The buyer lifts cashflow a little, not a lot.

That is the key. You do not need a miracle turnaround. You need competent funding and a few operational wins.

Here is an illustrative sketch that shows how you can do it.

Deal structure:

• Purchase price: $56m
• Debt: $35m to $40m
• Equity: $16m to $21m
• Interest rate: 7% to 9% (typical private credit / bank reality in this kind of environment)
• Radio is not capex heavy, so maintenance capex is modest.

Operating baseline:

• H1 FY25 “Total Audio” EBITDA was $5.7m, so an annualised baseline is about $11.4m.

Now turn that into a simple three-year equity payback story.

Assume:

• EBITDA starts around $11.5m in year 1.
• It rises to $12.5m by year 3 through cost cleanup and better yield management, maybe some cost out.
• Interest on $40m of debt at 8% is $3.2m a year.
• Tax and capex take the rest.

You can end up with roughly $5m to $7m of free cashflow a year available to equity. Three years of that is $15m to $21m. If the equity cheque is around that same $16m to $21m range, the equity payback is around three years.

That is the whole trick: the payback is on the equity, not on the headline purchase price. And after three years, the buyer still owns the asset.

The Laundys are uniquely placed to do something here that other buyers can’t: leverage their vast reserves of property assets to secure the leverage on the asset and ensure they don’t pay a huge price on the interest. Business financing is often expensive, but property leverage tends to be much cheaper.

So even in a flat world, if the business is still doing $11m to $12m of EBITDA and it trades at a conservative 5x to 6x, you are still looking at an enterprise value in the $55m to $70m range. The buyer has been paid out the equity price along the way and still has an asset with resale value. The downturn in radio revenue would need to be pretty severe for that to be a bad decision.

So where does the free cash come from?

People hear “private owner will improve it” and assume cost cutting plus layoffs. I think it’s going to be a lot simpler than that for the Laundys to achieve some bumps to the cash price. There’s a few things they can do to improve the free cash position quite quickly.

1) Take out public-company drag
Inside a listed group, segments carry overhead allocations and reporting burdens that do not exist for a standalone operator. Put simply, there’s just a lot more cost in running public companies and each business unit cops that tax.

2) Run the ad inventory like a yield business
Talk radio often sells in patterns that persist because “that’s how it’s always been sold”. A buyer who cares about cash will be ruthless about pricing discipline, packaging, and sponsorship structure. I suspect the Laundy’s will get very smart about ensuring a wider community of advertisers, probably more from their world, are buying advertising assets. And I suspect those advertisers are probably easier to reach through the world of the Laundy’s than the corporate world of Nine.

3) Make events a real product, not a promo tactic
A hospitality family is unusually good at turning an audience into a room full of people. That matters. Live broadcasts, audience nights, community events, sponsor-funded segments, local partnerships. This is where “pub operator” becomes an advantage rather than a curiosity. I suspect we will see more live events where the Laundy family brings together radio talent with local community.

None of these are moonshots. They are the kinds of changes that can turn “steady EBITDA” into “slightly better EBITDA”. In a leveraged deal, “slightly better” is a big deal. Even small changes and lifts to revenue can deliver real results.

The radical play could also be in media

There’s of course one more lateral thought that an observer could take, which is every man and his dog is getting into selling media close to the point of transaction and trying to monetise it. The alcohol industry has been no exception to that rule.

One surprising thing for me has been that pubs haven’t gotten into the media game (yes, I know the temptation is to call it retail media, but I’m not sure pubs have the data organised enough yet to make the claim of being in that space). The Laundys, hinting at a close relationship with Nine post-transaction, may see a pathway to doing this. Could we see a world where the Laundy Group and Nine partner to create one of the first true, scaled pub ad networks?

Where does this leave the media market?

This is a bet that the market has priced talk radio like it is dying fast, while the cashflow suggests it will die slowly.

If the decline is slow, you get paid. If it is flat, you get paid more. If you can improve cashflow modestly, leverage turns that modest improvement into a very fast equity payback. It’s a very simple equation for a buyer who values cash generation and equity payback more than public market valuations.

The three-year “money back” story is not magic. It is financing plus a business that already produces real EBITDA at a low purchase multiple. That is why a pub baron buys a radio station in my view. Political considerations aside, the Nine radio deal looks like a very astute purchase.

Now to the next real question everyone should be asking … Does this logic now apply to Are Media?

My gut tells me we might be about to find out.

Henry Innis is the co-founder and CEO of marketing measurement business Mutinex.