Nine signals focus shift away from traditional TV after ‘transformative year’

Nine Entertainment has shifted its focus away from traditional TV broadcasting, emphasising positive results for its subscription streaming and publishing businesses, alongside newly acquired outdoor media company QMS as it posted growth in profit and revenue amid a hard market.

Chief executive Matt Stanton said the company was signalling a “transformative year” after the full sale of real estate listings company Domain, its conservative-leaning talkback radio network and the QMS deal, with profits up 11 per cent to $147 million and revenue rising three per cent to $2.19 billion.

It is now structured around three areas: publishing, streaming and broadcast, and outdoor advertising.

”The business has been completely transformed into three key divisions,” Stanton told this masthead.

“What happens a lot of the time when you put these results out is people go straight to the free-to-air TV Channel Nine part of the business. In reality, that’s now less than 25 per cent of our revenue and even EBITDA going forward.”

“It’s still Nine, but it’s Nine Entertainment. The biggest growth asset we’ve got is QMS, which we acquired this year. That is the biggest growth assets we’ve got.”

Stanton also told staff 70 per cent of its earnings in the coming fiscal year are expected to come from streaming, digital publishing and its outdoor media business.

“People still sometimes think about the narrative of Channel Nine, and I often get called the Channel Nine chief executive when I’m the Nine Entertainment chief executive, and so this is really going to be this big transformative year for this year, huge change from where we were 12 months ago as an organisation, and this is just the start of us signalling this out there into the marketplace.”

Stanton confirmed around 35 staff will be impacted by redundancies in its publishing division. The division, which includes The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age , Brisbane Times and WAToday is performing strongly overall. Digital subscription revenue was up 15 per cent, despite total paying subscribers across division that also includes The Australian Financial Review staying flat across the year at 510,000.

Stanton refused to rule out further job cuts across both the publishing and television division.

“I’m not going to commit that we won’t carry on doing that because we do have to carry on changing,” said Stanton. “We’re a business, we’re shareholders, and we create value, so we’ll continue to do that and make sure we get the most efficient and effective workforce that’s appropriate for our business at that time.”

Nine’s total television category, which includes broadcast television and free streaming platform 9Now, reported a revenue fall of 9 per cent to $1.03 billion and an EBITDA decline of 12 per cent to $133.5 million.