The accounts for the first 18 months of talkSPORT ownership by News UK show profits have fallen sharply.
The Telegraph reports on the published accounts, saying the national speech station reported a pre-tax profit of £7.5m, compared with £21.2m in the prior 12 months.
Even excluding exceptional items, cash earnings fell by £4.1m to £9.1m. Revenues were £73.5m, up from £49.2m over the shorter period. The monthly average was flat and the company had a longer 18 month accounting period due to fall in line with its parent company.
A News UK spokesman told the newspaper that the accounts did not reflect all one-off costs and that advisory fees on the takeover and start-up marketing costs for new stations were recorded as operating costs, which made the drop in profits appear worse.
In Ireland, The Times reports Q102 reported a profit before tax of €62,948, down 86 per cent, whilst FM104 recorded a pre-tax profit of €2.05 million, up almost 4 per cent.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. When will they realise they bought a pup?
These accounts are for the period to 30 June 2017 so they already over twelve months out of date.
Like Murdoch will be that bothered given he’s just made millions selling Fox to Disney.
As an outsider, there’s seems to be much BBC-esque waste going on within Wireless, especially with talkSPORT 2 which much of the time seems to be in competition with its parent station with near-identical shows. Surely it should be an opt-out service? With Virgin Radio, all you can say is “how is this distinctive?” against so many other pop stations. Less of a crime, but still questionable in financial terms is opening up talkRADIO overnight for such a tiny potential listenership. If they have any spare cash for that station it should go into marketing the daytime output.