Q1 2007
Tomas Franzén’s comments on the Interim report January - March 2007.
Our ambition for revenue growth in a mid term perspective is 3-5 percent with accelerating growth in online revenues, increased revenues from voice and reduced decline from print. In order to meet the ambition we have started out the year quite aggressively;
First of all we launched new versions of eniro.se, eniro.fi, eniro.dk, gulesider.no and kvasir.no at the beginning of the year. These sites were launched with new designs and improved functionalities. The sites were well received – and we continue to increase high quality traffic for the benefit of our advertisers.
Secondly, and very important for our business going forward is the organizational split we made at the beginning of the year in Sweden. We have now organized the Swedish business in three separate units; print, online and voice. The purpose is to have business units with more focused sales forces and to facilitate new initiatives and faster product development.
Thirdly, we have increased our sales force in most markets and especially within online in order to better leverage on the Internet opportunity.
Fourthly, we made some strategic acquisitions in Sweden by acquiring leta.se, an established start page in Sweden with more than 1.1 million visits per week and by acquiring 48 percent of bubblare.se. Bubblare is the first site in Sweden on which the public can upload their own film clips and view other people’s clips. In Norway, in order to increase traffic and revenues for sol.no, we formed a jointly owned company with Norsk Aller AS.
The figures in the first quarter were in line with our expectations as well as with our full year guidance.
Our total revenues increased organically by 1 percent. The online revenues increased organically by 13 percent and voice revenues by 8 percent for the quarter. The print revenues declined by 8 percent organically, mainly caused by, as we expected, a large decline in revenues from the Oslo book in Norway.
EBITDA for the Group improved by 30 percent to SEK 510 M (391), including capital gains totaling SEK 140 M. Excluding the capital gains, EBITDA was somewhat lower than last year, affected by lower print revenues in Norway. The new initiatives in Sweden related to investments in sales, the organizational split and the launch of eniro.se, also impacted EBITDA negatively while changed publication dates had a positive effect on EBITDA.
We held our Annual General Meeting during the first quarter, which approved the proposed dividend of 4.40 SEK per share and granted the Board a buy-back mandate of 10 percent of the total number of shares in the company.
We remain firm on our full year guidance as announced in our year-end report 2006.
Tomas Franzén
President and CEO
Last updated: 2007-07-19