Daily Mail firm profits hit by one-off costs
BRITISH newspaper group Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) said yesterday that it still expects full-year earnings to grow, helped by an improved second-half performance, after the cost of disposals, restructuring and redundancies hit its first half.
“Clearly the trading environment does remain somewhat challenging, particularly for our consumer businesses, but these results do illustrate the progress DMGT is making,” chief executive Martin Morgan told reporters.
The Daily Mail said the market share of its daily and Sunday titles was higher in March than a year earlier and early indications were that the launch of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun on Sunday had little impact on the mid-market Mail on Sunday.
The group, which prints the Daily Mail and a string of regional titles, said adjusted first half pre-tax profit fell 14 per cent to £105m on revenue down two per cent to £973m, which it attributed to a string of one-off items which hit the results on a reported basis.
Shares in DMGT dropped by 1.4 per cent to 400.1p.