United Business Media’s (UBM) revenues from continuing operations grew by 17% to £739.1 million in 2006, up from £633.7 million in 2005, whilst operating profit rose by 18% to £149 million, up from £126.7 million in 2005.
By the end of 2006, the proportion of revenues and profits generated from events was 29% and 43.3% respectively, whilst revenues derived from online business grew by 18.5% on an underlying basis, accounting for 5.6% of overall UBM revenues.
PR Newswire accounted for 17.1% of revenues and 28% of profits, with underlying revenue growth of 6.8% for the year.
UBM said that it expects to earn more than 85% of its profits this year from PR Newswire, from exhibitions and events, and from online workflow data products and print directories.
David Levin, Chief Executive Officer of United Business Media plc said: “2006 was a successful year for UBM. We delivered a strong financial performance, increasing revenue, operating profit and returns to shareholders. We made important progress in our strategic development. UBM is a focused set of professional B2B media and service businesses that connect buyers and sellers across complementary media – events, data, online, print and news distribution – helping buyers and sellers to do business, and their markets to operate effectively and efficiently.
“In 2006 we continued to rebalance UBM’s media portfolio towards events, online media and data-based products in order to take advantage of shifting patterns of market growth, media consumption and advertising spend. We continue to direct UBM’s businesses towards those markets which offer higher growth, more predictable revenue streams, more reliable profitability and markets which will be sustainable into the future as the digital revolution advances.
“Having made 18 acquisitions in 2006 for a total of £163m, we expect to meet the target we set in February 2006 of investing £300m-£500m in acquisitions by the end of 2007, whilst maintaining our strict financial criteria for acquisitions. The pipeline of potential acquisitions is currently good and our capacity to manage and integrate our acquisitions has grown.
“We will fulfil the commitment we gave in February 2006 to return capital in excess of £300m to shareholders by the end of 2007. We will do this by paying a special dividend totalling more than £200m to shareholders in March 2007, subject to shareholder approval. This will meet our capital return commitment a year early and will take the total of capital returned to shareholders since March 2006 to more than £360m.”
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