Owners of Irish Daily Mail see profits hit €1.17m
THE company that publishes the Irish edition of the Daily Mail and the Irish Mail on Sunday made a pre-tax profit of €1.17m in the year to September 31, 2018, accounts just filed show.
The accounts for Associated Newspapers (Ireland) Limited show sales of €16.218m last year – up from €15.83m a year earlier. Operating costs rose from €14.88m to €15.025m in the period.
Staff costs of more than €11m were by far the biggest expense in 2018. The Irish business had 147 staff last year. However, since the start of the current financial year, 40 of those staff members have been made redundant, the accounts stated.
As well as its newspaper titles here, Associated Newspapers owns Evoke.ie, a lifestyle website, and news website Extra.ie.
It bought Rollercoaster, an Irish website targeted at parents, this year.
In a note with the accounts, directors named risks facing the business as “typical of the newspaper publication sector”, including the “further decline of print media in favour of digital”. The directors consider the financial risk profile of the business to be low.
In May, Associated’s London stock market listed parent DMGT reported a jump in underlying profit, boosted by the consumer media division, which includes the Daily Mail and Metro newspapers, and by “continued growth” in its business-to-business portfolio.
In April, the group spun off its £662m (€688m) stake in publisher Euromoney to shareholders.