The accounts are for Mediahuis Ireland Ltd, the company behind the group’s newspapers in the Republic of Ireland.
Antwerp-headquartered Mediahuis’s Irish business includes the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent and Sunday World as well as regional titles such as The Kerryman and Wexford People.
The group also owns the CarsIreland and Carzone digital marketplace brands, and the Belfast Telegraph in Northern Ireland.
The newly filed accounts show revenue for the newspaper business in the Republic dropped from €68.3m in 2022 to €51.94m last year. That drop was offset to a significant extent as the cost of sales declined from €66.3m to €26.2m, although what are described as administration costs were up significantly – to almost €22m from €2m.
The 2023 numbers reflect the loss of revenue from third party print contracts after the business shut its Irish print plant and outsourced its own printing. It’s also the first set of figures since the abolition of Vat on newspapers, a change publishers including Mediahuis said was vital to the viability of the sector.
The net result for the year was a swing into profit for the business – from a loss in 2022 of €5.1m to a profit after tax of €1.3m in 2023.
The Mediahuis Ireland Ltd accounts show the news business in the Republic had 412 employees in 2023 and staff costs of €25.8m. A redundancy process earlier this year, the second in 12 months, aimed to cut costs in the wider cross-border business by €4m.
The directors of Mediahuis Ireland Ltd are Peter Vandermeersch and Ian Keogh, who are the CEO and chief operations officer respectively of the wider Mediahuis Ireland group.
In their commentary on the filed accounts, they describe an ongoing restructuring of the business, which now has 90,000 digital subscriptions on the island of Ireland, from print to online.
“The company is currently working towards a digital transformation that will see the business aggressively pursue a digital-first publishing platform as the traditional consumption of media through newspapers slowly declines,” the directors’ note says.
The business undertook a “legal entity rationalisation project” in 2023 which merged a number of subsidiary entities (Mediahuis Ireland Marketing Limited, Mediahuis Ireland Regionals Limited, Mediahuis Ireland Digital Limited and Meadiahuis Ireland Sunday Newspapers Limited) into a simplified corporate structure.
Media group Mediahuis bought Independent News and Media in 2019. Mediahuis Group itself reported total turnover across its operation including Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany of €1.241bn in 2023. That was down slightly from 2022. The 2023 group net profit was up to €69.6m from €65.4m in 2022.