ABS-CBN to meet P2-B income target

MANILA, Philippines - ABS-CBN Corp., the country’s largest media and entertainment company, is confident of delivering its promised earnings of P2 billion this year as profits jumped 22 percent in the first nine months.

Ronaldo Valdueza, chief financial officer of the ABS-CBN Group, said the company is maintaining its profit target this year amid the softening in advertising revenues in September and October.

“We are still maintaining our net income target of a little over P2 billion for the year,” Valdueza stressed.

ABS-CBN Corp. chief finance officer Aldrin Cerrado said in a briefing that the consolidated net income of the company reached P1.89 billion from January to September or P340 million lower compared to P1.55 billion in the same period last year.

“The growth in income was fuelled by strong regular advertising revenues as well as election-related ads,” Cerrado said.

Consolidated revenues, he said, went up 16 percent to P25.23 billion in the first nine months from advertising and consumer sales.

According to him, advertising revenues rose 20 percent to P14.77 billion while consumer sales grew 11 percent to P10.45 billion.

Revenues of cable TV giant SkyCable jumped 21 percent to P4.98 billion due to higher number of subscribers as a result of the acquisition of Destiny Cable. 

Cerrado said the company’s total costs and expenses increased 15 percent to P22.75 billion brought about by increases in production costs, cost of sales and services, and general and administrative expenses.

He explained that capital expenditure and film and program rights acquisition fell 20 percent to P2.81 billion

He said the company is behind its capital expenditures budget as it has deferred investments on the impending shift to digital terrestrial TV.

“We are behind our spending because we did not spend so much on digital terrestrial TV,” Cerrado said.

However, the company would be investing heavily after the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) issued a memorandum circular for “Standard for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) Broadcast Service” adopting Japan’s Integrated Service Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial or ISDB-T standard instead of Europe’s Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial 2 or DVB-T2.

ABS-CBN is spending close to P2 billion to shift of the Japanese standard.