Warner Bros. Discovery Stock Falls to New Low Amid Market Turmoil, Analyst Downgrade
variety.comTodd Spangler NY Digital EditorWarner Bros. Discovery’s brutal year in the stock market hit a new bottom, as shares of the media conglomerate sank 8.1% Thursday — taking a bigger punch than peers.With the stock drop Thursday, to close at $13.65/share, WBD’s market cap stands at about $33.1 billion.
That’s well under its current debt load of some $55 billion. The share price is down 45% since WBD began trading April 11 following the close of Discovery’s deal for WarnerMedia.On Thursday, JPMorgan downgraded Warner Bros.
Discovery stock from “overweight” to “neutral,” citing uncertainty about its direct-to-consumer streaming strategy. With the streaming wars in full throttle, “coming to the party late is a challenge for any DTC provider but particularly onerous” for WBD, which may not be able to be competitive in a “cluttered marketplace,” JPMorgan analyst Alexia Quadrani wrote in a research note.
Overall, major U.S. market indexes were down again Thursday. That came after Wednesday’s brief rally following the Federal Reserve’s move to raise its key interest rate by 0.75 percentage point, the biggest increase since 1994, in a bid to control inflation.The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.42% Thursday, declining 741.46 points to 29,927.07 — dropping below 30,000 for the first time since January 2021.
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