Finance.yahoo.com is featuring an article noting that Richard Ingrassia of Roth Capital Partners raised WWE from neutral to buy (increasing the stock from $10 to $12) based on recent gains in Pay Per View buyrates for non-Wrestlemania related events. Ingrassia also made a bold claim that the launch of the new WWE Network has the potential to add $68 million in revenue for 2013.
“Ingrassia said in a client note that pay-per-view buy rates for non-Wrestlemania events increased 37 percent in the second quarter, the first meaningful improvement in the figure in four years.
The analyst says that the company is also going to have more hours of its television programming on basic cable as it is launching a new one-hour show called WWE Main Event, and its Monday Night Raw program will expand from two hours to three hours. The company also debuted WWE Saturday Morning Slam five days ago.”