How is RTL Group now performing in Central and Eastern Europe?
Away from the important announcements earlier this week about senior executive changes, the creation of Europe’s leading ad-tech development unit and record first half revenues, the company revealed, in its latest set of results, the state of play of its two operations in the CEE region.
In Hungary, it noted that RTL Hungary’s revenues in H1 were, at €54 million, 5.9% higher than in the corresponding period last year. At the same time, EBITA rose from €5 million to €7 million.
This compared favourably to the Hungarian TV ad market as a whole, which grew by 2% in the first half of this year.
However, in terms of viewing figures the broadcaster, though still ahead of its main competitor TV2, lost ground in the critical 18-49 prime time audience segment. It claimed 27% in H1, down from 27.4% a year earlier, as the gap between the two narrowed from 4.3 to 2.1 percentage points.
On the other hand, its flagship channel RTL Klub – both broadcasters operate a portfolio of services – claimed 13.5% of viewers aged 18-49 in primetime in H1. This was up from 13% a year earlier and 2.5 percentage points of TV2’s flagship channel despite the latter also growing its share.
Meanwhile, the VOD platform RTL Most goes from strength to strength and saw its registered user total grow by 41% in the year to June 30.
Furthermore, it had 52.7 million video views across all platforms in H1, up from 16.5 million a year earlier.
As in Hungary, RTL performed better in Croatia than the TV ad market as a whole, which dipped 6.2%. RTL Croatia’s revenues of €21 million were unchanged on a year earlier, while EBITA fell from minus €1 million to minus €2 million.
Meanwhile, RTL Croatia’s channels saw their combined primetime audience share in the 18-49 aged group fall from 28.6% in H1 2018 to 26.1% in the first half of this year. The flagship channel RTL Televizija saw its share fall from 19% to 17.4% over the same period.
On the plus side, the VOD platform RTL Play had 5.7 million views in H1, or 90% more than a year earlier.
