Warner Music Group, loving home to Ryan Cabrera
, Tangerine Dream, and every wonderful thing in between, has won a tremendous PR feather in their big conglomerate cap. According to the New York Post, WMG stock has soared 34% year-to-date with their share price currently valued $8.13. Yeah, it’s still not that high, but after facing a record low $4.36 per share on January 9, WMG did the dance called the bootstrap and now sits on top of the corporate pile as the best performing media stock of 2008 (so far)! Bully to you, WMG!
Nevertheless, WMG’s current listing is a far cry from its starting value of $29.48 when the company went public in 2005. Plus, since the stock was already so low at the beginning of the year, any minuscule improvement was bound to kick their percentage way up in comparison to their corporate homeboys. That doesn’t matter much, though, since the stock of every company in WMG’s peer group has tanked since January 1. Google fell 31%, the always charming News Corporation dropped 32%, and CBS is down 37%. So even though WMG didn’t gain that much ground, at least it can pat itself on the back for not sinking further into the current economic whirlpool.
But the whole inflated percentage thing did allow WMG to pass up the super strong nerd stocks of Marvel and Activision Blizzard, both of which saw 25% gains in their stock value, sailing each company’s price-per-share into the mid-30s. But screw them. Nerds don’t count. Let WMG have their day in the sun. Just this once.
