Meredith To Sell TIME Media Brand To Marc And Lynne Benioff For $190 Mln Cash

(RTTNews) - Meredith Corp. (MDP) announced a definitive agreement to sell the TIME media brand to Marc and Lynne Benioff for $190 million in cash. The Benioffs are purchasing TIME personally and the transaction is unrelated to Salesforce.com (CRM), where Marc Benioff is Chairman, co-CEO and founder. This transaction is expected to close within 30 days.

Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff will not be involved in the day-to-day operations or journalistic decisions, which will continue to be led by TIME's current executive leadership team.

Meredith acquired TIME as part of its purchase of Time Inc., which closed on January 31, 2018. Shortly thereafter, Meredith announced it was selling Time Inc.'s news and sports brands, TIME, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and MONEY, to focus on brands serving its core audience of American women.

Meredith expects to announce agreements for the remaining asset sales in the near future.

As part of the deal, Meredith will provide short-term business continuity services and has entered into a multi-year agreement with the Benioffs to provide services such as consumer marketing, subscription fulfillment, paper purchasing and printing.

Meredith expects to use proceeds from this transaction to pay down debt. Meredith expects to reduce its debt by $1 billion during fiscal 2019 and targets a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 2.0x to 1 or better by the end of its fiscal 2020. This includes generating $1 billion of EBITDA and having net debt below $2 billion by the end of fiscal 2020.

MDP closed Friday's regular trading session at $52.40.