This post is part of a series of posts called “Company Notes.” These posts contain quotes and exhibits from earnings calls, conference presentations, analyst days and SEC filings. The quotes are generally pieces of information that I find interesting or helpful to understanding the company, industry or economy and are not meant to provide summaries of the full content of the call. Other posts in this series can be found by clicking here. Full transcripts can be found at Seeking Alpha.

$FMCN Focus Media Holdings 4Q12 Earnings Call Notes

“In terms of the ad environment, in the fourth quarter, because of the political tension between China and Japan, the auto sector was quite badly affected. A lot of the Japanese auto ended up not putting a whole lot of budget onto sort of what we call the medium- to high-end media companies. So for the most part, I think the fourth quarter is, to a large extent, affected by that, though we see some recovery to it at the end of December last year in terms of that segment. But as of right now, we still haven’t seen it back to what we would consider to be normal, sort of normal in terms of the environment. In terms of the outlook for the current year, it’s still — to put it in short, it’s still unclear as far as how it’s going to pan out. As of the way that we look at it, currently, is that given the change in the government, in China for the most part, we believe that there will be a transition phase in terms of when a lot of the policy that’s been talked about will start to take in — take effect in the country. Until then the macroeconomy, I think for the most part, I think you probably read in a lot of different media reports as well as like your shops in terms of different [indiscernible] banks outlook, there’s still some uncertainties as far as how the macroenvironment will pan out. And given advertising is highly correlated to the macro in terms of the economic environment, at the moment, it’s difficult to tell exactly how it’s going to pan out for 2013. We’re keeping a close eye on it. I mean, the best I could — we could try to — help to — and try to take a look at it is that, in terms of qualitatively, the environment in the first quarter as compared to fourth quarter, is about similar. If you really want to drill down to it may be slightly better, but not a whole lot better.”