For the year end­ing De­cem­ber 31, 2022, Guardian Me­dia Ltd (GML) re­port­ed prof­it be­fore tax­a­tion of $3.9 mil­lion, com­pared to a $6.5 mil­lion prof­it in the pri­or year.

Rev­enues re­port­ed for the year were $117.8 mil­lion ($104.7 mil­lion–2021) re­flect­ing an in­crease of $13 mil­lion or 12.5 per cent in ad­ver­tis­ing rev­enues.

The me­dia group’s fi­nan­cials, which were re­port­ed yes­ter­day, in­di­cat­ed that op­er­at­ing ex­pens­es in­creased year-over-year due to the com­pa­ny’s ef­forts to stim­u­late com­mer­cial in­ter­est, and to fund growth strate­gies across all busi­ness seg­ments.

GML chair­man, Pe­ter Clarke, ex­plained that 2022 opened with­out the much an­tic­i­pat­ed lev­els of com­mer­cial re­cov­ery and ac­tiv­i­ty.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, he said the Rus­sia-Ukraine war, sup­ply chain chal­lenges and fi­nan­cial mar­ket pres­sures forced busi­ness­es to fo­cus on sur­vival in­stead of ad­ver­tis­ing cam­paigns.

“As part of our 105th year cel­e­bra­tions, we at Guardian Me­dia, spared no ef­fort to re­con­nect ad­ver­tis­ers with their cus­tomers by in­vest­ing heav­i­ly in ir­re­sistible con­tent, whilst con­tin­u­ing to be the trust­ed me­dia part­ner across all plat­forms,” Clarke ex­plained.

He added that dur­ing the year the com­pa­ny’s brand­ed ra­dio cam­paigns in­clud­ed the Cau­ra Fest, Sangeet Pre­mier League, bar crawls and oth­er out­side broad­casts, through which loy­al lis­ten­ers were again able to con­nect with their favourite on-air per­son­al­i­ties.

“Af­ter in­tro­duc­ing our cit­i­zens to icon­ic glob­al mo­ti­va­tion­al speak­er Sad­hgu­ru in Au­gust, we cov­ered the 2022 Caribbean Pre­mier League, and ac­quired the rights for the 2022 FI­FA World Cup fi­nals in Qatar, as well as the Eng­lish Pre­mier League,” Clarke added.

He said the steady con­tri­bu­tion of the news­pa­per was re-en­forced by its huge­ly pop­u­lar spe­cial pub­li­ca­tions and in­creas­ing­ly pop­u­lar dig­i­tal pres­ence.

Com­bined, these cam­paigns stim­u­lat­ed in­creased ac­tiv­i­ty and ad­ver­tis­ing spend.

“In sim­i­lar fash­ion to 2021, the fi­nal quar­ter’s per­for­mance was very strong. In 2022, for the quar­ter end­ed De­cem­ber 31, Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed prof­it be­fore tax­a­tion of $10.3 mil­lion, just be­hind last year’s fourth quar­ter re­sult of $11.5 mil­lion prof­it be­fore tax­a­tion.

“These re­sults were dri­ven pri­mar­i­ly by our suc­cess­ful 2022 FI­FA World Cup Fi­nals cam­paign,” Clarke fur­ther ex­plained.

He added that the board has an­nounced a fi­nal or­di­nary div­i­dend of four cents per share. Pref­er­ence share­hold­ers will re­ceive a fi­nal div­i­dend of three per cent.

Div­i­dends will be paid on June 15, 2023.