RTL Group Sees H1 Profits Surge

Reported Group revenue was up 3.8 percent to 2.8 billion euros ($3.1 billion) thanks to strongly increasing revenue at Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland, growing digital revenue and favorable exchange rate effect.

RTL Group’s digital revenue was up 94 percent to 219 million euros ($246 million), benefiting from organic growth and new acquisition. Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland’s EBITA reached a new record high for a first half at 343 million euros ($385 million), up 9.6 percent, driven by significantly higher TV advertising and also higher diversification revenue. At Groupe M6, EBITA decreased to 105 million euros ($118 million), mainly reflecting lower EBITA contributions from the company’s diversification businesses. RTL Nederland’s EBITA was down to 27 million euros ($30.3 million), mainly due to challenging advertising market conditions. RTL Hungary’s EBITA was up to 16 million euros ($18 million), driven by one-off effects such as the partial reversal of a stock valuation allowance and the re-claim of the advertising tax paid in 2014.

Anke Schäferkordt and Guillaume de Posch, co-CEOs of RTL Group, commented: “In the first half of 2015, RTL Group significantly increased revenue, EBITA and net profit, mainly driven by another strong performance from Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland and our rapidly growing digital video businesses.

“Looking at our recent digital investments, BroadbandTV, StyleHaul and SpotXchange, which are now grouped together in the RTL Digital Hub, revenues have been increasing by high double digit-growth rates—and we expect them to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In terms of RTL Group’s aggregated online video views, we expect our full-year figure to reach more than 80 billion this year.

“In the digital age of total choice, the fundamentals of our business have never been more promising: Linear TV dominates the video market and is the only medium consistently reaching mass audiences day by day. In total, people watch more video content than ever before—long-form and short-form, linear and non-linear, on the TV screen and on multiple devices. The demand for high-quality video content is growing rapidly, as does online video advertising.

“RTL Group has leading market positions across the whole value chain of this rapidly evolving total video market. With our financial strength, it is our ambition to significantly grow RTL Group over the next years—to transform the leading European entertainment network into a global force in video production, aggregation and monetization.

“Assuming there will not be major changes in the economic climate across our markets, we raise our outlook for the full year 2015. We now expect our total revenue to be slightly up compared to the full year 2014. We expect full-year reported EBITA to be in line with last year despite lower contributions from one-off gains in 2015.”