Times Mirror Profit Rises 20% on Ad Revenue, Cost Savings
Times Mirror Co., citing advertising gains and lower newsprint costs at the Los Angeles Times and the rest of its newspapers, said Wednesday its third-quarter profit climbed 20% from a year earlier despite an 8% decline in revenue.
The earnings, which exceeded Wall Street forecasts, also reflected higher newspaper sales. The Times and the company’s other major newspapers “reported solid increases in both daily and Sunday circulation,” Times Mirror Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President Mark H. Willes said in a statement.
In the quarter ended Sept. 30, Times Mirror’s net income rose to $66.9 million, or 62 cents a share, from $55.7 million, or 42 cents, a year earlier. Revenue fell to $814.5 million from $885.6 million mainly because Times Mirror divested certain of its professional-information holdings.
Times Mirror--whose other major newspapers include Newsday in Long Island, N.Y., the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford (Conn.) Courant--said the newspaper group’s pretax profit from operations jumped 19.2% in the quarter, to $86.1 million from $72.2 million a year earlier.
The group’s revenue rose 5.5%, to $530.5 million from $503 million, as a 6.7% increase in advertising revenue more than offset “a modest decline” in circulation revenue. Also, newsprint prices--though up from the second quarter of this year--remained below their levels during the third quarter of 1996.
Times Mirror said The Times’ daily circulation averaged 1.05 million in the six months ended Sept. 30, up 21,103 from the comparable period a year earlier, and its Sunday circulation averaged 1.36 million, up 11,859.
The company’s professional-information segment posted third-quarter operating profit of $49.3 million, virtually unchanged from a year earlier, even though the year-ago results included $30.3 million from units that have since been divested.
And Times Mirror’s magazine group reported operating profit of $5.5 million, up from $2.9 million a year earlier, mainly because of higher advertising revenue.
For the first nine months of 1997, Times Mirror’s profit rose 39%, to $178.1 million, or $1.56 a share, from $127.8 million, or 89 cents a share, a year earlier. Its nine-month revenue slipped 4%, to $2.4 billion from $2.5 billion.
