Distributor Smiths News has hiked profits despite further falls in magazine and newspaper circulation.
The group, which supplies around 30,000 UK retailers and newsagents, reported a 9.2% plunge in like-for-like wholesale magazine sales in the year to August 31, blaming "wider economic pressures" for an ongoing drop in demand, as well as heavy price cuts in TV listings while newspaper sales were also down 2.7%.
The group said it was on track to see half of all profits come from outside of newspaper and magazine wholesaling by 2016, up from 29% in the past financial year, as it diversifies towards digital media, as well as supplying resources to the education and care home market through recent acquisition The Consortium. Underlying group pre-tax profits rose 11.6% to £53 million.
Smiths said profits and revenues rose across all four divisions, with the core news distribution arm seeing earnings up 2.5% as cost cutting offset newspaper and magazine sales falls.
Its Bertrams book wholesaler posted a 6.1% rise in underlying operating profits, while educational and care home supplier The Consortium delivered a 15.3% rise in earnings. The firm's DMD media business, which supplies inflight entertainment to airlines, also saw a double digit increase in earnings, up 11.1%.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article