Central European Media Enterprises (CME) has reported on the last quarter before announcing the sale of its broadcast assets in Croatia and Slovenia.
Its net revenues in the three months ending June 20 amounted to $181,856,000, a 3.8% actual and 5.5% like-for-llie (lfl) increase on the same period in 2016. OIBDA was $61,169,000 (+14% actual, 15.4% lfl), while the net income of $27,935,000 contrasted with a loss of $141,317,000 a year earlier.
Looking at the first half of the year, CME notes that the TV ad markets in the six countries it was present in were overall 6% higher at constant rates. TV ad revenue growth was particularly strong in Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovenia.
Commenting on the results, Michael Del Nin, co-CEO, said: “The first half of the year has been marked by important transactions and impressive financial performance, the combination of which positions us for a significant reduction in our leverage over the next 18 months. Following a successful sale of our operations in Croatia and Slovenia, we will have brought forward our deleveraging plans by a year and will be in a position to take full advantage of the automatic reductions in our borrowing costs. As a result, once we have achieved this, we should be able to pivot from our intense focus on debt reduction by 2019. While this will increase the options we have for capital allocation, our decisions will, as always, be driven by our determination to create shareholder value.”
Christoph Mainusch, co-CEO, added: “The successful spring season contributed to prime time audience share increasing in five countries in the first half of 2017, while operating margins improved, as additional investments in content were mostly offset by other savings. These investments in programming in highly competitive markets also support our initiatives to diversify revenues, and carriage fees and subscription revenue grew significantly in the first half of the year. We still expect carriage fees and subscription revenue from our four remaining operations going forward to increase double digits this year.”
