At today's Annual General Meeting, Sir Victor Blank,
Chairman of Trinity Mirror plc provided a summary of current trading and Group
operations. The following statement is today released to the London Stock
Exchange.
'These are exciting times for Trinity Mirror. As we look back
over the year that saw your company become the largest newspaper publishing
group in the UK, it is clear that its creation has produced a host of
opportunities.
As we stated on 17th March, we have had a good start to the year
and the Group's operations have performed strongly during the first four months
of 2000.
Advertising
During the first four months, advertising revenues for The
Mirror and Sunday Mirror have grown by 5% year on year, with both titles
producing the largest volume growth in their respective popular markets. This
excellent performance further confirms the progress being made in the
development of the Group's national daily title and the repositioning of the
Sunday Mirror alongside that of its sister daily. The Racing Post has achieved
double digit growth in its advertising revenues. This has been driven primarily
by the growth in Internet betting.
The regional newspapers' advertising revenues increased by 8%,
with all regions recording growth. Classified advertising revenues have grown by
10%, led by a continued strong recruitment advertising performance which was 21%
ahead of last year.
Circulation
Per the latest ABC figures, the Mirror and Sunday Mirror have
both continued to gain market share, outperforming their direct competitors
during the six months to March 2000. Despite a 10p increase in cover price over
the same period in 1999, the Sunday People's trend of circulation performance
has improved.
Circulation revenues of the regional newspapers have been robust
during the first four months of the year.
New media
One of the most exciting value-creating projects underway at the
Group is our new media strategy. Our objective is to build ic24 into one of the
UK's leading portal brands and to be the first fully integrated national and
local portal.
The goals for the next 12 months are to have 1m access
customers, over 100m page impressions a month and to achieve annual revenue of
£7m in 2000. We are pleased to report that we are on plan to achieve all of
these goals.
A major new marketing campaign commenced at the beginning of
April aimed at recruiting access customers. The campaign is a mix of direct
marketing, posters and TV media, and has so far attracted over 95,000 new net
registrations, increasing our number of active customers by 44% from 215,000 at
the beginning of March to just over 310,000 by the end of April 2000.
The development of both our central and regional ic network of
sites is key to achieving all our goals. Further development of content is on
plan, with the first phase of the central portal,
ic entertainment, due for launch at the end of May, and the next
two phases in June and July. The first ic regional site, icscotland, was
launched in a beta phase of development in April. The rest of the regional sites
are scheduled for roll-out between June and September 2000.
Monthly page impressions for all our sites aggregate to in
excess of 48m in April, having increased from 38m in December.
We strongly believe that our leading market position sets us in
good stead to capitalise on the opportunities before us.'
