Merrill Lynch expects that advertising at the FT Group of newspapers will fall by around 13% on underlying basis in the second half of the year. The decline will be driven largely by a 15% fall at the Financial Times, a 13% fall at Les Echos and a 5.5% decline at Recoletes, excluding Argentina.
Circulation at the
FT has also been under pressure recently, with the broker estimating a drop of around 7% in H2. Merrill says that cover price increases will offset the sales dip to some extent, but predicts that circulation revenues will nevertheless fall 2% across the year and by around 5% in 2003, assuming no further cover price increases.
The FT Group management had been assuming that advertising would be flat in H2, although analysts say that this now looks optimistic, particularly if figures from the Wall Street Journal and Wall Street Journal Europe are anything to go by.
