Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp is going to ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on Monday — the first official day of trading for the new publicly traded publishing company.
It will be the first time that Time has been a public stock since its merger with Warner Communications in 1990 created Time Warner.
Officially, it spins off from Time Warner at midnight Friday, but the real trades don’t begin until Monday morning.
In pre-market trading, the stock seems to be hovering somewhere in the $23-plus range. TIME — WI (for When Issued) closed at $23.35 and dropped a tad in after-hours trading to $23.30.
On Friday, Ripp will be nervous when several hundred top managers and executives convene in New York for the quarterly management meeting.
On Thursday, the editors got their last big party, when the chief content officer, Norm Pearlstine, and a top editor at Fortune convened to hand out the Luce awards — named for Henry Luce, who cofounded the company in 1922 with Briton Hadden.
Ripp has frequently recalled in his stump speech how it was Time Inc. money that originally funded Home Box Office — now an integral part of Time Warner.
The challenge facing Ripp will be to transform the business faster than the print earnings decline.
The task just got a little more complicated with the demise of the magazine wholesaler Source Interlink Distribution, responsible for getting nearly a third of the nation’s magazines to retailers’ shelves.
Time said it expects it will take one to three months to iron out delivery problems as its shifts to one of the surviving wholesalers, and the upheaval will shave $12 million from its estimated 2014 earnings.