Martha Stewart CFO quits, joins Ancestry.com
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc's chief financial officer is leaving the magazine publishing company named after the lifestyle guru to join the parent company of genealogy website Ancestry.com.
Howard Hochhauser will join The Generations Network in Provo, Utah, as CFO.
"I've been here nine years. That's a long time," Hochhauser, 37, told Reuters in an interview. "The company is in a good spot. Once the economy recovers, (it) should perform really well."
Allison Jacques, Martha Stewart's controller, will serve as the company's principal financial officer while it searches for a new CFO, Martha Stewart Living said in a statement released on Wednesday.
The Generations Network is owned by Spectrum Equity, a private-equity group. Spectrum led a $300 million investment to buy a majority interest in the company. It first invested in Generations in 2003.
Besides Ancestry.com, Generations also runs websites such as Genealogy.com, Rootsweb.ancestry.com and dna.ancestry.com. Ancestry.com has local websites in nine country and has digitized and put online more than 7 billion names and 26,000 historical records collections in the past 10 years.
The company expects revenue to hit $192 million this year, up in the mid-teens percentage range. Its earnings before income, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) likely will be a bit above $60 million, Hochhauser said.
Martha Stewart previously projected EBITDA this year of about $23 million, Hochhauser said.
Hiring the CFO of a publicly held company could be a prelude to listing Generations on the stock market. The company is not discussing its future plans, however.
Initial public stock offerings are few these days, largely because companies are loath to sell shares to investors, only to see them hammered on the stock market by huge market swings brought on by the financial crisis.
Investors also are increasingly leery of companies whose track records have yet to be tested by the open markets.
(Reporting by Robert MacMillan. Additional reporting by Phil Wahba; editing by Gunna Dickson, Richard Chang)
