Business publisher Centaur Media will save more than £1.5m a year as a result of last month’s company restructure, which saw it sell off several titles and scrap print editions of Design Week and New Media Age.
On 27 June Centaur announced it was merging its business publishing group – which includes The Lawyer and Money Marketing – into three groups: creative and marketing, legal and financial, and Engineering and HR.
In a trading statement released this morning, the company said the restructuring would cost around £2.5m – the majority of which will go on redundancy payouts.
The restructure and disposal of titles like The Recruiter, The Logistics Manager and Process Engineering, will reduce 2011 revenue by £7m, but Centaur said the titles made only a ‘small contribution’to profit.
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Elsewhere, the group expects to report that profit will be at the ‘top end of the board’s expectations”, and underlying revenue will be 10 per cent up on the last financial year.
Digital advertising revenue continued to perform better than print and was up 21 per cent in the second half of the year compared with print growth of 7 per cent.
Total advertising revenue grew 14 per while income from paid-for content was up 7 per cent.
“The last quarter of the year, which is normally our strongest, ended at the top end of our expectations,’said chief executive Geoff Wilmot.
He added: ‘The recently announced restructuring and rationalisation, our portfolio of market leading brands and our strengthened management team, will enable Centaur to benefit more rapidly from continuing recovery and from the recent investments in digital services.
‘This will provide a robust platform from which to deliver accelerated revenue growth and margin improvement in the medium term.”
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