Revenues at newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror fell by 9pc in the first four months of the year despite a surge in digital revenues at its newly acquired national titles.
A trading update covering the period from 1 January to 30 April showed that digital revenues at the Express & Star, bought by TM at the end of February, were up 40pc.
Like for like publishing revenue, excluding the new acquisitions, was down 9pc in the period, with print revenues down 11pc and digital up 2pc.
Print advertising revenue was down 17pc and print circulation revenue down 7pc, the latter being impacted by severe weather conditions during March.
Separate figures for the Express and Star saw overall revenues down 5pc with print down 8pc and digital growing by 40pc.
The update was issued ahead of the group’s AGM later today at which it is scheduled to change its name to Reach plc.
Chief executive Simon Fox, pictured, said: “I am pleased with the actions we have taken to protect print profitability whilst continuing to build our digital revenue.
“Our tight management of the business, the completion of the acquisition of the UK publishing assets of Express and Star, and appropriate investment in building our digital business make me confident that 2018 will be another year of progress.”
Earlier this week culture and media secretary Matt Hancock announced that the Express and Star acquisition would be referred to the Competition and Markets Authority and Ofcom on public interest grounds.
TM said today that it “remains confident that the acquisition does not present any competition or media plurality issues.”
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Let’s get this straight, Fox is “…pleased with the actions we have taken to protect print profitability whilst continuing to build our digital revenue”
So happy to lose 11% print revenue ( or is it 17%?) and to replace it with 2% from digital?
Firstly what’s 11/17% print and 2% digital in cold hard cash terms?
Percentages don’t mean anything to anyone
Secondly will he be the next in line to ‘ do an Ashley’?
If that’s his idea of “tight management of the business” it’s time he stepped aside as in the real world that’s underperformance and failure on a huge scale.
The AGM will be interesting ……
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Jazzie – for ‘tight management of the business’ read: ‘We’ve made more people redundant and more are to follow as we try to keep this sinking ship afloat’.
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Certainly interesting what these bosses regard as success. I would hate to see them fail.
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It would be interesting to see these figures with the revenues from closed or reduced print titles removed. L4L figures have been an impossible marker to gain any insight from when over the last few years they have closed down likely a million+ Copies of free titles alone as well as others.
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@echo
The sad thing is you’re absolutely correct, that’s their measure of success on the top floors these days and one upon which their bonuses are based: reducing FTEs
It used to be growing the business and quality standards, now it’s damage limitation and managing decline
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@formerloyalfollower, my understanding is that the like-for-like figures are precisely that – they are adjusted to take account of changes in portfolio. So any titles purchased in the current year would not be included in the Jan-Apr 2018 figures while any titles that closed last year would not be included in the corresponding figure for 2017.
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@jazzie The fish rots from the head. And Mr Fox’s controls on tight management of the business is indeed strangling any innovation. ideas or view from the editorial teams and commercial teams at the coal face.
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In other words: However hard we try to kill print off, we still need it to pay our bonuses to reward “our tight management”.
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Now what a competent company would do is look at what has been working digitally at Express and Star which led to the 40% growth and see if it could be replicated across the group. But it’s more likely that Trinity/Reach will make all those responsible for the growth redundant, change the online titles to “[vague geographic area name] Live”, ramp up the number of adverts and click bait and launch niche Facebook groups in a feeble attempt to offset the loss of traffic through algorithm changes. A company the size of TM should be a leading light for media innovation and be a beacon for the publishing world. Sadly, they seem to be directionless and sticking to tried, tested and failed initiatives which will only hasten the demise of the local press.
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Of course, Jazzie is right, it’s all very well TM framing everything in percentages but what, exactly, does it mean in terms of cold, hard cash?
Not sure if I’m allowed to post a link here, http://www.trinitymirror.com/images/news/Trading_Update_9_Feb_FINAL_Formatted.pdf, but if you Google ‘Trinity Mirror’ / 09/02/2018 / ‘Trading Update’ you’ll [unsurprisingly] get a copy of the Trading Update published in February.
The figures contained therein state that a 12% increase in digital revenue and an 11% fall in print revenue amounted to a 9% fall in overall revenue.
From this it is reasonably straight forward to deduce that the 12% increase in digital revenue has accounted for only 2% of the loss in print revenue [9% fall in overall revenue = 11% fall in print revenue – 12% increase in digital revenue] and, therefore, that print revenue still equates to six times digital revenue!
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