Shareholders Day
November 15, 2002
Following are transcripts of the presentations made at The Washington Post Company's Shareholders Day on November 15, 2002. The transcripts have been edited and contain clarifications.
The presentations at this Shareholders Day meeting contain certain forward-looking statements that are based largely on the Company's current expectations. Forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and achievements to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. For more information about these forward-looking statements and related risks, please link to Risk Factors under Shareholder Information on this website and refer to the section titled "Forward-looking Statements" in Part I of the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
by
MR. GRAHAM
MR. GRAHAM: I do not take it to be part of my job to go do pitches to analysts or what not to make the stock price go up. I do focus all the time on building the company's value for the long term. To say that I'm focused on that, doesn't mean that we're going to be successful at that, but our corporation, the group of us working at the top of the company are focused on the long term and are not making any effort at all to influence the stock price in one direction or the other. If the stock is going up, it's because there are more buyers and sellers and vice versa, but it isn't because of any activities that we're understanding.
An e-mailed question. As a new shareholder of WPO, I was curious to know if your acquisition requirements are similar to Berkshire Hathaway's with regard to the manager-owners of the possible acquisition. Does WPO try to keep the same managers, if possible, when reviewing possible acquisitions?
Well, as I said, for our most successful acquisitions that's been true. Gary Kerber, who ran Quest as a public company, and still runs Kaplan's Higher Ed division for us, is kind of living proof here today. But we tend to focus our acquisition activity in the six businesses where we operate - newspapers, magazines, broadcast television, cable television, education and the Internet, and certainly if we were to acquire a business outside of those, it would absolutely have to have management to come with it.
Within those businesses, we'd prefer to acquire businesses with able
managers. It's a very strong preference, but, for instance, in the Houston
and San Antonio television station acquisitions, we kept one manager and
brought in a Post-Newsweek manager from another station as the manager
in Houston. So we're able to provide some direction within our familiar
businesses, but our preference is to acquire businesses with strong management
talent.
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