Profits of £70.8m for Daily Post publisher

Aug 1 2008 by Alex Turner, Liverpool Daily Post

DAILY POST publisher Trinity Mirror has announced pre-tax profits of £70.8m for the first six months.

The group, which operates more than 350 media brands including 150 regional news-papers alongside the Mirror titles, had half-year revenues of £460.8m, down slightly on the same period a year ago.

The board acknowledged that the economic outlook had been uncertain and advertising revenues in particular had been hit.

Sly Bailey, Trinity Mirror chief executive, said: “The numerous actions we took during the period to reduce our costs and improve our efficiency, product portfolio and balance sheet have served to partly offset the impact of the serious down-turn in advertising expenditure being experienced by consumer-facing media businesses. We have implemented further efficiencies which will deliver at least an additional £20m of savings in 2009 by accelerating technological improvements to processes across editorial, advertising and pre-press.”

Trinity Mirror said total digital revenues from retained businesses grew by 40% to £22.3m. Shares rose nearly 4% yesterday.