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Trinity Mirror says costs savings £5m ahead of target

Trinity Mirror logo thumbnailTrinity Mirror has announced that its cost-cutting programme for 2017 is £5m ahead of target in a trading update issued today.

The publisher set a target of £15m in stuctural costs savings at the start of this year.

But according to today’s update, covering the nine months up to the end of September, the company has already achieved £20m of savings for the year.

The update also revealed that year-on-year revenue decline slowed slightly in the third quarter of the year, down 8pc compared to 9pc in the period January to June.

Publishing revenue was down 9pc, with print publishing revenue down 10pc and digital revenue up 4pc.

Print advertising revenues fell sharply by 16pc while circulation revenues were down 7pc but digital display and transactional revenues were up 14pc.

The company said:  “We have made good progress against our strategic initiatives and the business continues to deliver strong cash flows supported by structural cost savings of £20 million for the year which is £5 million ahead of our initial target.

“We are experiencing improving trends in nationally sourced print advertising revenues, though local advertising, particularly classified remain challenging and volatile.”

The update also revealed that discussions about a takeover of Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell Group, which includes the Daily Express and Daily Star, are continuing.

“Further to the announcement made on 8 September 2017, the Group continues to make progress on discussions to acquire 100pc of the publishing assets of Northern & Shell. Further updates will be made when appropriate,” it stated.

9 comments

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  • October 9, 2017 at 10:42 am
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    So many percentages. But without real life figures they’re quite meaningless really, nest ce pas?

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  • October 9, 2017 at 11:24 am
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    Trinity in shock announcement. Closing down 100’s of thousands of papers shrinks print revenue.

    Who’d have thought it.

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  • October 9, 2017 at 11:37 am
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    For ‘cost-cutting being £5m ahead of target’, read more people being made redundant, so nothing really to brag about. Neither is slowing the rate of decline from 9 per cent to 8 per cent – it’s still a decline of almost ten per cent despite all the meaningless, fluffy words from the chiefs.

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  • October 9, 2017 at 5:40 pm
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    You digital revenue is not up..!!!

    The sales teams now get more bonus for achieving their Digital targets than their print targets. So they carve the advertising revenue accordingly.

    I believe its called creative accounting.

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  • October 9, 2017 at 7:56 pm
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    It’s the slow rate of digital growth that’s the real worry here. Should be much better than that and, if you look closely at the published numbers, it was, prior to Local World seemingly dragging things down.

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  • October 10, 2017 at 9:51 am
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    Sadly if you dumb down your products enough and decimate your editorial departments in favour of free public supplied camera snaps and stories you’ll no longer need the number of staff you would ic quality and truly serving the local community were of importance so this is no surprise, fewer staff, less costs but resulting in a weaker product attracting fewer readers

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  • October 10, 2017 at 1:17 pm
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    As others have pointed out, TM’s boasts are all but meaningless until such time as they’re prepared to put some figures to their percentages.

    That said, the percentages contained in the fifth para may be more revealing than TM intended:

    ‘Publishing revenue was down 9pc, with print publishing revenue down 10% and digital revenue up 4%.’

    Assuming publishing revenue is made up of print publishing revenue and digital revenue, we can deduce a 4% increase in the latter equates to just a 1% increase in the former; or, if you prefer, despite all the cost savings and focus on the web, print still generates four times the revenue of digital.

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