Future shares slump after boss announces plan to quit

Shares in Future, the media group behind brands including Go Compare and Country Life, fell as much as 15 per cent this morning after its chief executive announced his plan to leave after only 18 months.
Jon Steinberg, who came in as Zillah Byng-Thorne’s successor in April 2023, has informed the board that he and his family want to move back to the United States next year.
Steinberg has a 12-month notice period so could potentially stay on in his role until next autumn, although Future has already begun the search for his replacement.
“Future is a wonderful business driven forward by incredibly talented people who I love working with and it was a tough personal decision to step down from the board next year,” Steinberg, 47, said.
Richard Huntingford, Future’s chairman, said: “I would like to thank Jon for the significant contribution he has made to the group. Whilst we are disappointed that he will be departing next year, we respect Jon’s decision to return to the US.”
The stock market shared that disappointment and Future shares fell 154p, or 15.7 per cent, to 830p.
“The news comes as a surprise,” Jessica Pok, a media industry analyst at Peel Hunt, said. “The company has finally made a turn for the better. [Steinberg’s] departure is undoubtedly disappointing and casts a shadow over the investment case.”
Future publishes magazines and runs websites in sectors including technology and video games, entertainment, women’s lifestyle and sport. Among its best-known brands are Marie Claire, Tech Radar and The Week.
The company developed a technology it calls Hawk that allows customers to click through links to products within its articles, with Future taking a cut of any sales, so journalists are encouraged to create content that is engaging but will also entice readers to spend money. It also makes money from digital advertising and magazine subscriptions.
Earlier in his career Steinberg worked for Google and Buzzfeed but made his name at Cheddar, the millennial-focused financial news network he founded in 2016. He sold the business to Altice USA for $200 million three years later.
He is widely seen as having done a decent job in his short time at Future, having guided the group through the post-lockdown normalisation in audience numbers and the slowdown in advertising spending over the past two years amid the increasingly uncertain geopolitical and economic outlook.
His “growth acceleration strategy”, under which Future has add new ways of monetising its content and closed less popular titles, including Total 911 and 3D World, has been praised by industry analysts. The group’s most recent trading update showed that it had returned to organic revenue growth over summer.
Given the wider industry headwinds, however, the share price has not reflected that progress. On his first day the shares were trading at £11.18, a third higher than where they are now after Friday’s slide.
As part of his remuneration package when joining Future, Steinberg was given a relocation fee of up to £260,000 to help with the cost of moving him, his wife and their two school-age children to London from New York. It is understood that the family is planning to move to Florida when they eventually return to the US.