Guardian Me­dia Ltd (GML) record­ed af­ter-tax prof­it of $44.7 mil­lion for the year end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2013, an in­crease of 26 per cent com­pared with the com­pa­ny's per­for­mance in 2012.GML chair­man, Gren­fell Kissoon, in a state­ment ac­com­pa­ny­ing the pub­lished re­sults, said that the 2013 rev­enue of $210 mil­lion was the high­est in the com­pa­ny's his­to­ry.

"The key fac­tors con­tribut­ing to this growth were the emer­gence of CNC3 as the lead­ing tele­vi­sion sta­tion in the mar­ket, the con­tin­ued dom­i­nance of our ra­dio net­work, the im­proved reach of our news­pa­per through the in­tro­duc­tion of new prod­ucts, and in­creased rev­enue from the un­prece­dent­ed four elec­tions in the year," said Kissoon, in the chair­man's state­ment.The GML chair­man al­so said that the com­pa­ny was tar­get­ing fur­ther in­vest­ments in the near fu­ture to con­tin­ue to ex­pand the me­dia house's busi­ness.

GML's net prof­it mar­gin in­creased from 19 per cent in 2012 to 21.3 per cent in 2013.GML al­so ex­pe­ri­enced a sev­en per cent in­crease in its to­tal as­sets, which end­ed the year at $393 mil­lion and re­tained cash and cash equiv­a­lents of $135 mil­lion at the end of 2013, an in­crease of six per cent over the pre­vi­ous year.In an in­ter­view, GML man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, Gabriel Faria, said the com­pa­ny was proud that it has es­tab­lished a rep­u­ta­tion as a leader in in­no­va­tion in the mar­ket.

"We are proud to be the old­est me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tion in the coun­try (97 years), but we are even proud­er to be the me­dia com­pa­ny lead­ing the change in this rapid­ly evolv­ing in­dus­try. Our mul­ti-plat­form me­dia busi­ness, span­ning print, ra­dio, TV and on­line, en­sures that our au­di­ences have the in­for­ma­tion and en­ter­tain­ment they want when they want it," said Faria.

He added that the com­pa­ny in­vest­ed heav­i­ly in the de­vel­op­ment and ac­qui­si­tion of pro­gram­ming to sat­is­fy its au­di­ences needs and made cap­i­tal in­vest­ments in all of its me­dia plat­forms to en­sure that the phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture was in place to dri­ve the fu­ture growth of the busi­ness.

He said the com­pa­ny "firm­ly be­lieves that qual­i­ty, in­de­pen­dent jour­nal­ism is the back­bone of any me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tion...Our job is to ask the ques­tions that of­ten peo­ple don't want asked. We strive to be as ac­cu­rate and fair-mind­ed in our re­port­ing as pos­si­ble and we have set up the process­es to en­sure this hap­pens."

As a re­sult of the com­pa­ny's per­for­mance, the GML board last week ap­proved a fi­nal div­i­dend of $0.42, bring­ing the to­tal div­i­dend for 2013 to $0.60, an in­crease of nine per cent over the $0.55 de­clared in 2012.The com­pa­ny paid out 53.6 per cent of its net in­come as a div­i­dend. This means that the com­pa­ny has a div­i­dend yield of three per cent and div­i­dend cov­er of 1.86.With an earn­ings per share of $1.12 at the end of 2013, GML is cur­rent­ly trad­ing at a PE ra­tio of 17.63.

GML is a pub­licly list­ed com­pa­ny whose ma­jor­i­ty share­hold­er is the ANSA McAL group.