sto­ries by KY­RON REG­IS

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

Guardian Me­dia Ltd (GML) has record­ed a prof­it of $3.6 mil­lion for the quar­ter end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2020.

This rep­re­sents an in­crease of $5.3 mil­lion or a rise of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 312 per cent.

In the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial state­ments GML Chair­man Pe­ter Clarke said: “Quar­ter­ly im­prove­ments were achieved from Elec­tion and CPL rev­enues off­set by con­tin­u­al rev­enue loss­es brought about by COVID-19.”

Clarke added that com­pared to the sec­ond quar­ter, this quar­ter’s net in­come im­proved by $10.4 mil­lion, from a sec­ond quar­ter loss of $6.8 mil­lion to a third quar­ter prof­it of $3.6 mil­lion.

GML’s rev­enues re­port­ed for the quar­ter end­ing Sep­tem­ber 30, 2020 al­so showed im­prove­ment, reg­is­ter­ing $33.3 mil­lion - ahead of sec­ond quar­ter rev­enues of $18.6 mil­lion by 79 per cent of $14.7 mil­lion.

How­ev­er, for the nine months end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2020, GML’s rev­enues re­port­ed were $80.3 mil­lion com­pared to $83.3 mil­lion for the same pe­ri­od in 2019. This rep­re­sent­ed a 3.6 per cent de­crease.

Al­though the com­pa­ny saw a 83 per cent in­crease in to­tal com­pre­hen­sive prof­it for the nine months end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2020, GML still in­curred a loss of $1.78 al­beit less­er than the 2019 loss in the same pe­ri­od of $10.57 mil­lion.

Clarke not­ed nonethe­less, that GML main­tains “strong cap­i­tal lev­els and our bal­ance sheet re­mains healthy.”

He added that these re­sults re­flect the on­go­ing im­pact of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic in­clud­ing re­duced ad­ver­tis­ing spend from busi­ness clo­sures, fur­ther lo­gis­ti­cal and op­er­a­tional chal­lenges and the over­all de­cline in busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty.

The Chair­man ex­pressed that dur­ing this dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od, GML con­tin­ues to place em­pha­sis on pro­tect­ing the health and safe­ty of its em­ploy­ees, cus­tomers and the pub­lic.

He con­tin­ued: “In spite of COVID-19 chal­lenges faced, our re­sults re­flect ear­ly re­cov­ery from cor­rec­tive mea­sures put in place over the past two years and con­tin­ued em­pha­sis on prod­uct en­hance­ment, sales ex­cel­lence, cost con­tain­ment and em­ploy­ee en­gage­ment.”

In the third quar­ter, Clarke said the com­pa­ny con­tin­ued its thrust to keep peo­ple in­formed, healthy and safe dur­ing the pan­dem­ic through the air­ing of pub­lic ser­vice an­nounce­ments, ed­u­ca­tion­al pro­gram­ming and ex­pand­ed lo­cal news cov­er­age.

“Fol­low­ing our ex­cep­tion­al cov­er­age of the elec­tion cam­paign, we suc­cess­ful­ly brought the 2020 Hero CPL T-20 to our au­di­ences in Au­gust and Sep­tem­ber,” said Clarke.