Nadaleen Singh

Guardian Me­dia Ltd (GML) record­ed prof­it af­ter tax of $33.9 mil­lion for the pe­ri­od end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2014. In her re­port at the me­dia group's an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing at the Radis­son Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Lisa Agard told share­hold­ers GML had "mixed"re­sults dur­ing the fi­nan­cial year de­spite in­vest­ments in con­tent and peo­ple.

"Our print di­vi­sion earned $2.9 mil­lion or 2.5 per cent less rev­enue than the pri­or year. The elec­tion im­pact would have large­ly con­tributed to this," she said.Agard said the loss in rev­enue in the print di­vi­sion "was com­pen­sat­ed by $2.3 mil­lion or 2.3 per cent in­crease in rev­enue from our elec­tron­ic me­dia di­vi­sions."

She added: "Our in­vest­ments in peo­ple, tal­ent and con­tent, in­clud­ing rights to the Caribbean Pre­mier League Crick­et, con­tributed to the com­pa­ny's abil­i­ty to sus­tain in 2014 the rev­enue lev­els earned in 2013. These ini­tia­tives are ex­pect­ed to gen­er­ate in­creased yield and rev­enue in 2015 and be­yond."

Agard told share­hold­ers GML's rev­enue has been trend­ing up­ward over the last five years, grow­ing from $187 mil­lion in 2010, to $209 mil­lion last year, with fur­ther growth an­tic­i­pat­ed for 2015."Con­tent and peo­ple re­main the core dri­vers of our busi­ness. The com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to in­vest in at­tract­ing the best tal­ent and de­liv­er­ing pro­gram­ming that grows our mar­ket share.

"How­ev­er, high­er op­er­at­ing costs were in­curred in 2014 as a con­se­quence of those in­vest­ments re­sult­ing in re­duc­tion of our prof­it be­fore tax from $58.8 mil­lion in 2013 to $44.6 mil­lion in 2014 and a con­se­quen­tial de­crease in prof­it be­fore tax mar­gins from 28 per cent to 21 per cent. These de­clines are ex­pect­ed to re­verse in 2015," she said.

The an­nu­al re­port shows that GML had cash at bank and on hand of $13 mil­lion, $41.6 mil­lion in its in­come fund and $56.2 mil­lion in its mu­tu­al fund­Chair­man Gren­fell Kissoon said in­vest­ments in as­sets dur­ing the fi­nan­cial year in­clud­ed the ac­qui­si­tion of the FM fre­quen­cy 99.5FM."Dur­ing the year we in­vest­ed over $18.3 mil­lion in fa­cil­i­ties, plant and equip­ment, and ap­prox­i­mate­ly $5.8 mil­lion in the ac­qui­si­tion of a con­ces­sion to up­grade Ra­dio Trinidad 730 AM to the FM band," he said.

Kissoon said GML's bal­ance sheet po­si­tion re­mained "sol­id," since net as­sets grew to $316.2 mil­lion com­pared to $311.8 mil­lion the pre­vi­ous year–an in­crease of $4.4 mil­lion.Speak­ing af­ter the re­lease of the com­pa­ny's an­nu­al re­port, he said: "I have in­di­cat­ed to the share­hold­ers that we have had an ex­cel­lent first quar­ter per­for­mance, which means that the mea­sures that we put in 2014, is be­gin­ning to bear fruit. We are op­ti­mistic about the prospects for 2015."

Com­ment­ing on the re­lo­ca­tion of GML's print di­vi­sion to Ch­agua­nas, Kissoon said: "We did an eco­nom­ic eval­u­a­tion and de­ter­mined that it was a bet­ter in­ter­est over­all from the point of view of ef­fi­cien­cy and from the point of view of econ­o­my."