Versant VSNT

Current Stats

Post-Spinoff Performance

Computed from split-adjusted closing prices. Returns are total return — (end price + dividends received − start price) ÷ start price — with no reinvestment assumed.

Post-Spin Analysis — September 10, 2026

Written against the September 10 close of $37.36. Primary sources: Versant’s Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 (filed 2026-03-03) and its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 (filed 2026-08-06), with the separation terms from the Form 10 registration statement as amended through December 2025. Price, volume and float figures are computed from this site’s own daily archive.

The one-line version

Versant is a declining business that is not declining as fast as its price implies, attached to a capital structure built by someone else. Revenue has fallen at about 5% a year for three years and slowed to −2.5% in the first half of 2026, while the shares are priced for an indefinite decline of roughly 11% a year. The gap between those two numbers is the entire investment case.

The objection is not the cable networks, which everyone can see. It is that Comcast took roughly $8.5 billion of cash out of this business in three and a half years while spending about six cents of capital expenditure per dollar of depreciation — and then attached $3.2 billion of BB-rated debt to it on the way out. What you are buying is a cash machine that has been run for cash, by a seller, for a long time.

Rating: HOLD · Target $42 · Grade: B (2.75)

What the business actually is

Two businesses with opposite trajectories, reported together.

The company reports that its brands reached more than 120 million viewers a month as of the second quarter of 2026. That figure is a reach statistic, not a revenue statistic, and the two have been diverging for a decade.

The number that actually matters is the mix: non-pay-TV revenue grew from 17% to 19% of the total during 2025, and management has said it is targeting 33% within three to five years. At $826 million of Platforms revenue against $6.69 billion of total revenue, reaching a third of the business means either roughly tripling Platforms or shrinking Networks by half. Management is explicit that it intends the former. The arithmetic permits the latter.

Management Team

Thirteen named officers, and the striking thing is how few of them are new. This is the NBCUniversal cable leadership bench, moved across intact.

The distinction that matters is operator versus caretaker, and this reads as operator. Every network has its own named president — CNBC, MS NOW, Entertainment, USA Sports — which is how the assets were run inside NBCUniversal, not a structure assembled to shepherd a disposal. Distribution & Partnerships exists as its own presidency, which is the correct emphasis for a company whose revenue is decided in carriage negotiations.

Two roles are worth noting. Anand Kini holds both CFO and COO, which concentrates the financial and operating decisions in one person at a company whose central problem is managing decline — efficient, and a key-person dependency. And Will McIntosh’s Digital Platforms and Ventures presidency is the seat the entire re-rating case depends on: Platforms is what has to reach a third of revenue.

The board, and the fact that changes the analysis

Ten directors, all seated effective 11:59 p.m. on January 2, 2026, from the separation 8-K’s Item 5.02.

The notable thing is who is absent. Brian Roberts is not on this board, and neither is any other Comcast executive. The chair is independent, all three committees are chaired by directors other than the CEO, and the only management seat is Lazarus’s. On every conventional governance screen this is a well-constituted board.

Which is precisely why the Class B matters more than it appears to. Control here is not exercised through board seats, where it would be visible and contestable. It sits in the charter, where a 33⅓% voting block and a merger veto operate regardless of who the directors are or how independent they look. A reader checking governance by counting independent directors would conclude the opposite of the truth.

The filings say so directly:

“Our Class B common stock has substantial voting rights and separate approval rights over certain potentially material transactions, and Brian L. Roberts, the Chairman and CEO of Comcast, has considerable influence over Versant through his beneficial ownership of our Class B common stock.” — Versant Form 10-K, year ended December 31, 2025

Versant is a controlled company, and the control did not stay with Comcast — it stayed with Brian Roberts personally. The amended articles of incorporation, filed with the January 5, 2026 separation 8-K, set the mechanics out precisely, and they are more severe than the conventional dual-class arrangement:

That third row is the one that matters, and it is not the usual 10-to-1. The charter does not merely give Class B extra votes; it fixes Class B’s share of the vote at one third by construction, with Class A’s per-share vote defined as whatever quotient makes that true. Issuing Class A stock dilutes economics without diluting control.

Class B also holds a separate class vote over, among other things, “mergers, consolidations, or transactions resulting in any person or group owning more than 10% of combined voting power” and any amendment limiting Class B rights. That is a categorical veto over a change of control, held by one person.

This is the Comcast governance structure reproduced in the spinoff. It is disclosed, it is legal, and it is easy to miss because every conventional ownership screen reports Versant as 99.2% float with 0.2% insider holding — which is true of the economics and irrelevant to the control.

The financial record — three years, and what the separation costs

From the Form 10-K. All figures in millions of dollars.

Revenue is declining steadily. Earnings are declining much faster, and in 2025 the gap was mostly self-inflicted. Revenue fell 5.1% then 5.3%. Operating income fell 11.0% then 30.9% — apparent downside operating leverage of about 5.8 times in 2025.

That number overstates the operating reality, and the line that explains it is SG&A, which rose $302 million in a year revenue fell $374 million. Costs of revenue behaved normally, falling 4.1% against revenue’s 5.3%. Strip the SG&A increase and operating income would have declined about 14.5%, or roughly 2.7 times the revenue decline — still high, but a different animal. The 2025 margin compression is substantially the cost of becoming a company rather than the cost of losing subscribers.

⚠️ Interest expense of $13 million is the most misleading figure in the table, and it is misleading in the direction that flatters. Versant’s 2023 and 2024 statements are carve-out financials: the business carried none of the debt it now carries. The $3.2 billion of gross debt was raised around the separation, so 2025 captures only weeks of it. A full year of that debt at BB-rated coupons is plausibly $210–250 million of interest — against 2025 net income of $931 million, that is roughly a fifth of earnings arriving as a new, permanent cost that no year in the table above reflects. This is Trap 1 in the site methodology, and Versant is a clean example of it.

The first half of 2026, which is the first evidence of the standalone company:

The revenue decline halved. From −5.3% across 2025 to −2.5% in the first half of 2026, with the second quarter at −3.7%. Annualised, first-half revenue runs at about $6.66 billion against management’s full-year guidance of $6.15–6.40 billion — the company is tracking ahead of its own guidance on the top line.

Earnings kept falling anyway, and the reason is the previous paragraph: interest and standalone costs now land in full.

The cash Comcast took, which is the real story

This is the section that changed my view of the company, and it comes straight from the cash flow statement.

Comcast took approximately $8.5 billion out of this business in three and a half years. Over the same period the business spent $336 million of capital expenditure against $3,504 million of depreciation and amortization — under ten cents of investment per dollar of consumption, and under six cents in 2023 and 2024.

There are two readings and they are not mutually exclusive.

The benign one: these are content and carriage businesses whose D&A is substantially amortization of acquired intangibles and content rights, not machinery that wears out. Low capex against that kind of D&A is normal and not evidence of starvation.

The uncomfortable one: a business run at 5% capex-to-D&A for years by an owner who had already decided to sell it is not a business that has been prepared for independence. The Platforms assets — Fandango, GolfNow, SportsEngine — are the growth engine the entire equity story depends on, and they were funded out of that same $54 million. The 2025 and 2026 step-up in capex, and the $199 million spent acquiring Full Swing in the first half of 2026, are the first evidence of a different policy. Two quarters is not a record.

The $2.25 billion transfer in the first half of 2026 is the separation consideration itself: Versant raised the debt and handed the proceeds to Comcast, retaining roughly $500 million. That is a disclosed, ordinary feature of a leveraged spin. It is included above because a reader looking at “cash taken by the parent” should see all of it in one place.

Price and volume: a violent debut that resolved quickly

The separation terms were 1 Versant share for every 25 Comcast shares, with regular-way trading opening January 5, 2026.

The when-issued market said $55 and the regular-way market said $40.57 within three weeks. That is a 26% repricing between the two populations of holders, and it is the cleanest illustration in this cohort of what when-issued prices are worth.

The volume data says the forced selling was violent and brief.

Twenty sessions from spin to normal, with the half-life at two. The selling pressure was over well before the February 12 price low — which means the low was not made by forced selling. By day 38 the index funds and the mandate-constrained holders were long gone; what took the stock from roughly $33 to $27.42 was people who had decided.

That distinction matters for anyone treating spin drawdowns as mechanical. It also cuts the other way: volume at 0.66× baseline today is a third below the name’s own normal, which is interest draining away rather than a coiled spring. At about $55 million of daily dollar volume, liquidity is a constraint on position size for a large holder, not a reason to avoid the name.

The recovery has been real but incomplete: +36.3% off the low, still −6.1% against the day-1 close, against an S&P 500 that returned +13.1% over the same window. Versant has underperformed the index by roughly 19 points since separation.

The interval record, from this site’s archive:

The trough is at one month, not at one day. And by six months the dividend is already contributing 1.9 points — on a name yielding roughly 4%, income becomes a material part of the return quickly.

Capital allocation

The standalone record is eight months long, so this is a statement of policy rather than a track record.

Declared within sixty days of independence: a $0.375 quarterly dividend (roughly a 4.0% yield at $37.36) and a $1 billion buyback authorisation — about 19% of the current market capitalization. Executed by June 30, 2026: $200 million of repurchases and $53 million of dividends.

Bought: Full Swing for $199 million. Sold: businesses generating $140 million of proceeds. Net, about $59 million of portfolio reshaping toward Platforms.

That is a coherent posture for a declining business: return most of the cash, buy back stock while it is cheap, and redirect a modest amount of capital toward the growing segment. The buyback at these prices is accretive in a way it would not be at 10× earnings. The thing to watch is whether the buyback continues if the price recovers — a management team that buys stock at $27 and keeps buying at $50 is telling you it has nothing better to do with the money.

Valuation

The reverse discounted cash flow

I have run this backwards rather than forwards, because the forward version requires a terminal decline rate that is the entire question.

Assumptions, all stated:

• Shares outstanding 138.8 million at $37.36 → market capitalization $5.19 billion
• Gross debt $3.20 billion, cash $1.48 billion, net debt $1.71 billion — materially more leverage than the $2.75 billion headline separation financing implies, because borrowing continued after the spin ($986M drawn in 2025 and a further $1,973M in the first half of 2026)
• Enterprise value ≈ $6.90 billion
• 2026 guided free cash flow $1.0–1.2 billion, midpoint $1.1 billion
• Discount rate 10%, appropriate for a BB-rated, levered, declining business

At a $1.1 billion free cash flow midpoint against a $5.19 billion equity value, the market is paying a 21% free cash flow yield. Solved as a declining perpetuity at a 10% discount rate, that implies the market expects free cash flow to decline about 11% a year, forever.

Sensitivity on the load-bearing assumption — the perpetual decline rate:

About $2 a share for each percentage point of perpetual decline rate, in the region that matters.

Set against that: revenue declined 5.3% in 2025 and 2.5% in the first half of 2026. If free cash flow declines at the rate revenue does, the shares are worth something in the $45–55 range. The market’s −11% requires the decline to roughly double from here and never stop.

The honest counter, and it is a real one. Free cash flow does not have to decline at the revenue rate. Carriage renewals are step functions, not glide paths — a single lost distribution agreement can take several points of revenue at once and nearly all of it falls to the bottom line. Interest expense is fixed and rising as a share of a shrinking base. And the perpetuity model is generous to a business whose assets amortise: at 6% capex-to-D&A, the maintenance requirement is being deferred, not avoided.

Earnings-based cross-check

2025 net income of $931 million against 138.8 million shares is $6.71 of earnings per share, or 5.6×. Adjust for a full year of interest on $3.2 billion — roughly $224 million pre-tax, $170 million after tax at the 2025 effective rate of 24.2% — and normalized standalone EPS is about $5.48, or 6.8×.

Even at $5.48, a 6.8× multiple on a business whose revenue is declining 2.5% is the market pricing terminal decline rather than managed decline.

Price target

$42 is 11.5% above the current price. That is not enough to make this a BUY at $37.36, which is the whole reason the rating below is what it is.

What this most resembles

Eight media and entertainment separations from this site’s own universe, all measured on the same basis — day-1 close to the September 10, 2026 close. Each name links to its own profile.

Only one of these eight beat the S&P 500 on an annualized basis, and it is the one that owns arenas rather than networks. Every pure content or distribution business in the table underperformed the index, several of them severely, and that is the base rate Versant is being measured against.

AMC Networks is the case that matters. A cable-networks pure-play spun from a distributor, left with the linear assets while the parent kept the growth — the same structure, fifteen years earlier. It is down 69.7% and has compounded at −7.6% while trailing the index by 21.9 points a year. If Versant is AMC Networks, the market’s −11% implied decline rate is not pessimistic; it is roughly right.

The rebuttal is the volume column. Versant’s day-1 volume was 19.2× its own baseline — the highest in this table, with AMC Networks at 16.2× and Starz at 17.5×. Those three names went to −69.7%, +126.1% and −6.1% respectively. Spike magnitude tells you how violent the handover was, and nothing whatever about where the stock goes. Anyone reading a large day-1 dislocation as a signal should look at that row twice.

Against the 2026 separations by float, Versant is about as cleanly distributed as a spin gets: 99.2% float, 89.0% institutional, no retained parent stake, no election. That reading now needs the qualification set out in the Management section — clean economically, controlled through the Class B.

In depth: competitive dynamics

The cable networks compete for a shrinking pool of carriage fees against Warner Bros. Discovery’s networks, Paramount’s, and Disney’s linear portfolio — all of which face the same subscriber arithmetic and all of which have been separated, written down, or put up for sale in the last three years. The competitive question in linear television is not share, it is exit order. Being a pure-play here means no diversified parent absorbing the decline, and also no parent cross-subsidising a competitor’s bid for the same rights.

CNBC and MS NOW are the more defensible half. News viewership is older, stickier and less substitutable by streaming than entertainment, and both carry brand equity that survives the distribution pipe. Golf Channel plus GolfNow, GolfPass and Full Swing is a genuinely integrated vertical — content, tee times, instruction and simulators around one sport — and is the clearest example of what management means by Platforms.

Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes compete with Google and the studios’ own direct channels for the moviegoing transaction. They are good businesses with a weak structural position: they sit between a consumer and a studio, either of whom can route around them.

In depth: valuation against peers

Computed from the filings, not taken from a screen. Share counts are from each company’s latest cover page and include every class; prices are the September 10, 2026 closes from this site’s archive; debt and cash are from the most recent balance sheet; earnings are as stated below. The basis for each line is given because the three companies do not share a fiscal calendar.

Versant: 10-K FY2025 and 10-Q Q2 2026; EBITDA is the 2026 guided midpoint. AMC Networks: 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 (Class A 29,765,563 + Class B 11,484,408; cash $464.0M, long-term debt $1,661.0M); EBITDA is H1 2026 operating income plus D&A, annualized. Fox: FY2026 10-K, year ended June 30, 2026 (Class A 199,401,385 at $65.18 + Class B 220,248,764 at $58.06; cash $4,205M, borrowings $6,606M); EBITDA is revenue $17,126M less operating expenses $10,853M less SG&A $2,367M, plus back D&A $410M.

Versant trades at half Fox’s EV/EBITDA while carrying comparable leverage. 0.89× against 0.61× — both modest, both a world away from AMC Networks at 7.00×. The difference between Versant and Fox is business quality, and it is real: Fox grew 5.1% last fiscal year and Versant is shrinking 2.5%. The question the price is asking is whether a 7.6-point swing in growth rate is worth a 50% discount on the multiple and a 67% discount on earnings.

The leverage column is the one that decides which of the two comparisons is apt. Versant’s balance sheet looks like Fox’s, not AMC’s. That is not a detail: AMC Networks’ equity is a stub because three-quarters of its enterprise value belongs to lenders, and no operational recovery reaches the shareholder first. Versant’s lenders have a claim on 25% of the enterprise. Whatever happens to the business, the equity holder is still the residual claimant on most of it.

The AMC Networks comparison is the one that matters, and it inverts

The obvious reading is that Versant at 3.6× is cheap against AMC Networks at 9.9×. That reading is wrong, and the reason is the denominator.

AMC Networks’ EBITDA halved in twelve months — down 52% — and its multiple doubled without the share price doing anything helpful. A year ago AMC Networks screened at 4.8×, which is almost exactly where Versant screens today.

That is the bear case stated properly. The objection to Versant is not that 3.6× is a fair multiple for a declining business. It is that a cable-networks pure-play trading at 4.8× is not cheap if EBITDA can halve in a year, and AMC Networks has just demonstrated that it can. A low multiple on a collapsing denominator is not a margin of safety.

Two things separate Versant from that outcome, and they are the whole investment case. Versant’s revenue decline is slowing (−5.3% in 2025 to −2.5% in H1 2026) where AMC’s operating income fell off a cliff. And Versant’s capital structure is survivable: net debt of $1,722M against guided EBITDA of $1,925M is 0.89×, where AMC Networks carries $1,197M of net debt against $171M of annualized EBITDA — 7.0×, which is why nearly three-quarters of AMC’s enterprise value belongs to its lenders and its equity is a stub.

Versant is the same business at an earlier point on the same path, with fifteen years of runway AMC no longer has. Whether that is an opportunity or a delay is the question the price is asking.

In depth: is Versant an acquisition target?

No — and the reason is stronger than the §355(e) clock.

The clock is real: the separation was a tax-free distribution under §355, so an acquisition of Versant before January 5, 2028 risks retroactively taxing the separation to Comcast. §355(e) also binds Versant as an acquirer, which constrains any large stock-funded roll-up of its own for the next sixteen months.

But the clock expires and the Class B does not. Brian Roberts holds supervoting stock with separate approval rights over certain potentially material transactions — a veto, held personally, by the chairman and chief executive of the company that spun Versant off. A hostile bid is not available, and a friendly one requires his agreement. Any acquisition thesis here is a thesis about what one individual wants.

That is a genuine markdown to the case I would otherwise make, because the financial logic is excellent:

Private equity is the natural owner on paper. A business generating $1.0–1.2 billion of free cash flow at a 21% yield with BB debt already in place is a textbook leveraged buyout, and a predictable decline rate is a feature in that model. The obstacle is not financing or price; it is the veto.

A strategic consolidator — a combination with another orphaned linear portfolio — offers real cost synergy and no revenue synergy, and the regulatory path is easier than it once was precisely because the category is shrinking. Same obstacle.

A break-up is the live one, and it is the only route that does not require a change of control. Platforms at $826 million of growing revenue would attract a different and better-paying buyer than the networks. Selling or separating Platforms is a transaction management can execute, and the first half of 2026 shows them already trading the portfolio in both directions — $199 million spent on Full Swing, $140 million received from disposals.

What this means for the score: Acquisition Potential comes down. The arithmetic is attractive and the control structure means the arithmetic may never be tested.

Tail scenarios

Upside tails

A carriage renewal at flat rates (2σ). The bear case assumes each renewal takes a step down. One major distributor renewing flat, publicly, would reset the market’s decline assumption directly — and the sensitivity table says every point off the decline rate is about $2 a share. Worth $8–12 a share if it moves the implied rate from −11% to −6%.

Platforms reaching the 33% target early (2σ). If Platforms compounds toward a third of revenue faster than the three-to-five-year plan, the terminal value argument changes in kind rather than degree — a business that is one-third growing digital assets does not get valued as a declining perpetuity. Worth $15–25 a share, and it is the only path to a genuine re-rating.

A buyout at a private-market multiple (2σ). Legally blocked until January 2028 but not unthinkable thereafter. Precedent leveraged buyouts of cash-generative declining assets clear at 5–6× EBITDA, which against $1.9 billion implies $55–70 a share.

Downside tails

A major distributor drops the networks (2σ). The step-function risk. A single large carriage loss could take 5–8% of revenue at once, almost entirely at margin, and would validate the −11% decline assumption in a single announcement. Worth −$8 to −$12 a share.

Leverage becomes binding (2–3σ). At BB, with roughly $1.71 billion of net debt against declining EBITDA, the covenant arithmetic tightens every year the business shrinks. It is comfortable today at 0.89× net leverage on guided EBITDA. It becomes uncomfortable if EBITDA halves, which at −11% a year takes six years. The debt is not the near-term risk; it is the reason the terminal value is not zero-risk.

The buyback is the wrong use of the cash (2σ). Retiring 19% of the equity in a business that then declines faster than expected converts a valuation error into a permanent capital loss. This is the tail that management controls.

What would change this view

Better:

• Two consecutive quarters of revenue decline under 2%, which would put the realized rate at less than a fifth of the implied one
• Platforms revenue growth accelerating above 8%, or a Platforms segment disclosure that lets the two businesses be valued separately
• A carriage renewal disclosed at flat or better

Worse:

• Revenue decline re-accelerating above 5%, reversing the 2026 improvement
• Capex staying at 6% of D&A once the separation-year step-up laps — that would confirm harvesting rather than investment
• Any covenant amendment

Dated:

• Q3 2026 results, early November 2026 — the first quarter with a full standalone cost base and a full quarter of interest. This is the print that shows the real earnings power, and it is the single most important scheduled event for this name.
• January 5, 2028 — the §355(e) window closes and the acquisition case becomes live.
• Comcast’s NBCUniversal separation — Versant is the market’s read-across, and the causality runs both ways once the larger entity trades.

Thesis-breaking:

• Free cash flow falling below $800 million on a full-year basis, which would mean the market’s decline assumption was right and the valuation support goes with it
• The dividend being cut, which in a business held for cash returns would re-rate the equity downward regardless of the operating reason

Investment Scorecard

What moved and what deliberately did not.

This is Versant’s first investment grade on this site. The company has been carried in the research universe since January 2026 and covered in nine monthly reports without a letter grade.

Competitive Position at 2.0 is the score doing most of the work, and it is charged once. The secular decline of linear television is the objection to this company and it belongs in exactly one dimension. It is deliberately not re-charged to Financial Profile — where the three-year record is already reflected — nor to Strategic Rationale, where the separation itself was competently executed. Charging one objection to three dimensions is how a scorecard turns a single fact into a verdict, and the Qnity and Solstice reviews both had to unwind exactly that.

The Class B structure is charged once too, to Acquisition Potential, where its effect is mechanical and decisive. It is described under Management & Governance because that is where a reader looks for it, but it is not scored twice. Governance nets to 3.0 on its own merits: a genuine operating bench against a genuine absence of minority recourse.

Rating: HOLD. Target $42. The 11.5% gap to target is not enough to buy at $37.36, and the recovery from $27.42 has already taken the discount that made this interesting in February. The bear case is visible and the bull case is arithmetic: everyone can see cable is dying, and the market has priced it dying at roughly twice the rate it is currently dying. Being right requires only that the decline stay ordinary — and AMC Networks, down 69.7% over fifteen years on the same structure, is the reminder that it may not.

Accumulate below $33, where the implied decline rate exceeds 14% and the free cash flow yield passes 24%.

Nothing on this page is investment advice. Figures are drawn from the primary filings linked at the top and from this site’s own price archive; where a figure could not be primary-sourced, that is stated in the text rather than estimated silently.