Daily Sport publisher records £18.2m loss
The Daily Sport‘s publisher Sport Media Group has recorded a £18.2 million pre-tax loss in the year to 31 July, after stripping £20.7 million off the value of its assets.
SPMG was forced to write down the value of Sport Newspapers, which it bought for £50 million in December 2007, by around one third due to current market conditions, according to reports.
“The directors consider these write-downs to be an appropriate reflection of the current trading position of Sport Newspapers’ business and the unprecedented circumstances in which businesses have been operating in 2008,” the company said.
The Daily Sport was relaunched in April last year, but SPMG failed to up its readership and has now been forced to admit that the titles’s circulation has fallen by 30% from the time of acquisition to 75,000 copies.
However, despite these results, the company insists that its underlying financial performance is solid – SPMG recorded an underlying pre-tax profit of £6 million on revenues of £29.4 million.
The sport publisher said the write-downs had “a distorting effect” on the financial statements.
SPMG’s results show that most of the group’s revenue comes from copy sales of its newspaper, while its mobile and internet activities continue to generate a significant proportion of revenue.