As the earnings season continues so does the dismal results for new media companies in the Indian Space. Here are the results of 3 companies which have a sizeable exposure on the digital media front.
UTV – UTV has had a good quarter and the same is reflected by the consolidated net profit of December quarter which grew 29.55% to Rs 29.90 crore when compared to same quarter last year. For the nine-month period ended December 31, 2008, the company registered a consolidated net profit of Rs 87.77 crore, a 76.49 per cent growth over the corresponding period last year. We had interviewed the new media head of UTV Mr.T.N. Prabhu recently and he had stated that UTV New Media expects to breakeven in 6-8 months. They have already done a revenue of Rs.14.3 crore for the 9 month period till 31st Dec, 08. They also have a gaming division which had acquired Indiagames in India and true games in US. Indiagames has been following the strategy of subscription based revenues via gaming for sometime now and have been seeing decent success as well. According to the earnings release Indiagames has reported a growth of around 20% QoQ.
All in all this has been a good quarter for UTV New Media and Gaming divisions and the future looks bright with UTVi.com becoming the 2nd most visited business news site and with Techtree gearing up for mobile revenues.
You can download the earnings release here
CyberMedia – Cyber Media has announced its third quarter results. The company’s Q3 net profit is down at Rs 1.77 crore (Rs 17.7 million) from Rs 1.99 crore (Rs 19.9 million) quarter-on-quarter, QoQ. Its Q3 net sales are up at Rs 21.9 crore (Rs 219 million) from Rs 20.9 crore (Rs 209 million) QoQ. The big news on the Cybermedia front is the upcoming launch of Technology Review website and magazine. The agreement was signed between Cybermedia and Technology review over 6 months back. The trend for bringing International B2B magazines seems to be catching one with even 9.9 Mediaworx looking at launching Inc Magazine to India.
The entire release can be downloaded here
Web18 – Web18 has had a tough quarter reporting a loss of over Rs.21.2 crores on a reported revenue of Rs.17.4 crores. Their earlier quarter loss was also Rs.24 crores approx. Web18 has plans to go for an American Depository Receipts (ADR) issue and has filed a draft registration statement for an IPO and listing on the NASDAQ exchange. Though the amount expected to be raised via this IPO isn’t yet disclosed.
Web18 has been consolidating all its propertied under the singular basket of in.com. Currently In.com is the second largest Indian portal in terms of traction. The only vertical site that Web18 has still not integrated with In.com is their finance portal moneycontrol.com which continues to be the moneyspinner. In.com has also got several content tie ups now with sister concerns or affiliated companies of Web18 and Capital18. To name a few Bookmyshow.com and Burrp.com (which is invested in by Harsh Chawla of Capital18). According to our sources In.com spends a lot of money acquiring music rights for its music streaming player which is a major attraction as well as a major cost factor.
All in all In.com which is Web18′s biggest bet has done well to garner traction but advertising dollars are hard to come by in these times so it will be interesting to see how well the next few quarters are for Web18.
You can download the entire earnings release here.
few other listed players you can add in roundup………..northgate(parent of bharatstudent)….geodesic(mundu)……logix microsystems(carazoo nd izmocars)…