Irvine-based online media company Local.com Corp. is focused on regaining profitability after losing money for a year.
The company is expected to break even in the December quarter, executives said earlier this month in a conference call with analysts and investors to discuss third-quarter financial results.
That would snap four straight quarterly losses. For the third quarter, Local.com posted revenue of $20.9 million, down 7% from a year earlier and missing Wall Street expectations.
Analysts on average had forecast sales of $22.3 million.
The company posted a loss of $1.1 million in the third quarter.
Wall Street was expecting a loss of $1.7 million.
Local.com expects revenue of $24 million in the current quarter, below Wall Street estimates of $26 million.
Analysts on average have forecast a loss of nearly $2 million in the current quarter.
Earnings have been affected in recent quarters as the company poured millions of dollars into acquisitions and research and development in a bid to compete in the hotly contested daily deals business.
“We will continue to make appropriate investments to build our business and intend to manage our bottom line to approximately break-even over the next couple of quarters,” Chief Financial Officer Ken Cragun said on the conference call.
Local.com gets much of its revenue from its namesake business, an online search engine that helps consumers find information on nearby businesses. That brings revenue from advertisers, who pay for targeted exposure through display and pop-up ads, links and other features.
The company is undergoing a diversification strategy to broaden its appeal among local advertisers and other customers, including its acquisition of the SpreeBird daily deals website earlier this year.
Investors remain skeptical even as some analysts have trumpeted Local.com’s prospects, largely on the basis of some key patents and a recent deal with Mountain View-based Google Inc.
Greenlight on Blu-ray
Home entertainment spending in the third quarter increased for the first time in more than three years, and sales of Blu-ray disk players drove the uptick, according to Los Angeles-based The Digital Entertainment Group.
Spending in home entertainment, considered a key economic indicator, jumped 5% from a year earlier, logging the first increase since the first quarter of 2008.
Blu-ray sales jumped 52% compared to a year ago, and the players are now in 33.5 million U.S. homes.
That’s welcome news for a handful of OC companies that rely on consumer spending on entertainment systems to drive sales, such as Irvine-based Vizio Inc., which designs and sells TVs, Blu-rays and soundbars; Linksys LLC, Cisco Systems Inc.’s Irvine-based home networking unit that helps deliver video to TVs, Blu-ray players and other devices linked to the Internet; Santa Ana-based SRS Labs Inc., which makes software and other components that boost sound quality in audio devices; and a host of local chipmakers.
New CFO at SRS
Walter “Chuck” McBride has been named chief financial officer of SRS Labs.
The industry veteran replaced Ulrich Gottschling.
McBride, 58, previously held the same position at La Jolla-based Synthetic Genomics Inc., a company that commercializes genomics for the energy and environmental markets.
HipGeo’s New Trip
Fullerton-based HipGeo Corp. has launched a new iPhone app that allows users to instantly share trips with friends online, adding features such as animation.
With their iPhones, users can take pictures and track their travels to create, save and share their trips through Facebook, Twitter, email, text or with an embedded HipGeo player on their blogs or websites.
The company was founded earlier this year and secured a $500,000 first-round investment in May from Morado Venture Partners, a seed-stage fund run by Ash Patel and Michael Marquez, former Sunnyvale-based Yahoo! Inc. executives. Other investors include Galen Buckwalter, former chief scientist at eHarmony Inc. in Santa Monica, and San Diego-based angel investor Robert Bingham.
