Will there be anything worth reading in the Daily Mail’s full year report on Thursday?
Despite feeling like the newspaper is the dominant press force in the UK, the Daily Mail hasn’t had a great year from a market perspective. After opening at £7.93 the stock had hit £6.11 in mid-September, before rising back to a current trading price – and 6 month high – of £7.06.
The company’s half year figures towards the end of the May really helped DMGT on its way to those September lows. The stock fell around 7% after it revealed a 76% plunge in interim pre-tax profit to £40.9 million, with like-for-like revenue flat at £293 million. Print advertising dropped 12% over the 6 month period, countered by a 19% jump in underlying sales growth at the company’s perpetual saviour Mail Online.
July’s third quarter update wasn’t much better. While pro-forma revenue was up 7% – underlying revenue was unchanged – the company warned that ‘market conditions remain challenging for some specific companies or parts of businesses’.
The most recent statement came at the start of October, with underlying revenue nudging 1% higher for the 11 months to August 2017. More damning was the claim that annual pre-tax profit would be at the lower end of estimations (though with adjusted earnings per share at the upper end of forecasts).
That means on Thursday analysts are expecting Daily Mail & General Trust to deliver a 17% slide in adjusted pre-tax profit to £214.6 million, alongside a near 8% drop in earnings, from 56p to 51.6p per share.
Daily Mail & General Trust (LON:DMGOa) has a consensus rating of ‘Hold’ alongside an average target price of £7.87.
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