MONTREAL – Radio, specialty TV and pay TV certainly are good businesses to be in.
Astral Media continued its string of growing, glowing quarterly reports reporting strong revenue, EBITDA, cash flow, etc for the first quarter of fiscal 2006, ended November 30, 2005.
The company said today that consolidated revenues totaled $153.8 million for the first quarter, an increase of 10% over the same quarter last year. EBITDA for the first three months increased 15% to $48.7 million and cash flow from continuing operations rose 17% over q1 ’05 to $34.5 million.
" Astral Media continued to show solid growth with our unique combination of individual brands and strong differentiated premium programming, driving advertising and subscriber revenue increases across the board," said Ian Greenberg, president and CEO, in a release.
"In pay television (The Movie Network, Super Ecran, etc.), we are very pleased to report that our recent marketing efforts have paid off with a 6% increase in total subscribers. During the quarter we also launched cinépop on November 1st, our new French-language retro-movie digital pay channel. On the specialty television side (Family, Z, vrak.tv, etc), our networks continued to benefit from strong audience ratings with an increase in advertising revenues of 14%. Our radio group (Astral owns a number of Quebec and Maritime stations) reported an increase of 12% in revenues and, subsequent to the close of the quarter, launched radiolibre.ca."
However, added the company, on December 13, 2005, the Québec government enacted a progressive increase in the general corporate income tax rate from 8.9% to 11.9%. This income tax rate increase will be phased-in between January 1, 2006 and January 1, 2009. As a result, the company was required to revalue its future income tax assets and liabilities using the newly enacted Québec corporate income tax rates, over which the Company has no control, taking into account the rates anticipated to be in effect when the related future income tax assets are realized or liabilities are settled. This resulted in a non-cash future income tax expense of $14.8 million ($0.27 per share) recorded in the three-month period ended November 30, 2005. Including this future income tax expense, net earnings from continuing operations for the first quarter of fiscal 2006 were $15.2 million.
In December 2005, Astral announced a 50% increase of its annual dividend, from 20 to 30 cents per share.
