- Winston Sill/Freelance Photographer
Oliver Clarke, the Gleaner Company's chairman and managing director, addresses Mayberry's Investors Forum at the Knutsford Court Hotel recently.
Al Edwards, Business Co-ordinator
THE GLEANER Company is actively expanding its products and looking to service new niche markets.
Addressing Mayberry's Investors Forum at the Knutsford Court Hotel earlier this month, the company's chairman and managing director, Oliver Clarke, highlighted a number of new products launched by one of the world's oldest newspaper companies.
YouthLink was relaunched as a tabloid in 2001 and comes out each week on a Tuesday. Mr. Clarke said that YouthLink was a direct effort to get young people interested in reading newspapers. "It is an important way to expand the future newspaper readership in the country," he said.
Mr. Clarke pointed out that Children's Own, a newspaper for primary, prep and all-age schools, is the leading printed product in Jamaica with weekly sales of 130,000. "It is largely a philanthropic exercise and we don't profit from it. We promote Spelling Bee through it and it gets children interested in reading newspapers."
'EXTRA'
The newspaper's chairman and managing director said the company was expanding its products outside of Jamaica and to that end has launched a new newspaper over the last year called Extra in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada. "This is a product that we are hoping to expand because we feel many of the young people of Caribbean heritage don't buy newspapers so we have to find a way of producing a product that will get to them, financed by advertising.
"What we are hoping to do is get these papers established and paid for by advertising... They will then be combined to have the highest circulation of any diaspora Caribbean newspaper. We are having some problems in getting them to break even but we see the promotion and maintenance of these newspapers as a major step in trying to get ourselves more established overseas with the younger community of Caribbean people and their children."
BLACK PAGES
In addition to that, the Gleaner has bought the Black Pages catalogue, a publication in Canada. It is a directory of black businesses operating in Canada.
What logic is there in acquiring this diverse portfolio of products?
"The logic is, if there is a viable niche market for newspapers in Jamaica we will try to go after it. We see our future fairly strongly tied up in how we can service the Jamaican community abroad and move more of our profits to be earned in the overseas markets where Jamaicans reside. We run six weekly publications abroad plus the Black Pages, all of which we will try to expand.
"In our attempt to expand our market we have gone into new media Go-Jamaica (www.go-jamaica.com), which is our Internet arm and has a wide range of services and is rapidly becoming the main medium by which Jamaicans communicate abroad. Last month Go-Jamaica had 95 million hits, that's three million hits a day."
With a 56 per cent stake in the radio station Power 106, the Gleaner Company is actively extending its reach through other media.
"Most people would regard us as a conservative company but if one looks at what we are doing we are aggressively trying to expand our reach and service to the Jamaican community. Go-Jamaica is now by a number of multiples, the biggest Caribbean Web site. I think that it is going to play a major role in the development of the relationship between Jamaica and the diaspora," said Mr. Clarke.
FINANCIAL REPORTS
Giving an overview on the company's financial reports, Mr. Clarke said that the company operates on a conservative basis. The company, he added, had recently had a major libel award against it and has settled in full all expenses relating to this case.
Unaudited results for the nine months to September show the Gleaner Group posting profits after tax of $144 million, an increase on last year's $119 million for the corresponding period. An exceptional item of $45 million largely arose from the sale of shares that the company was holding. This compares with an exceptional item figure of $10 million last year.
The revenue for the nine-month period has increased by 14.5 per cent over last year, mainly as a result of increased advertising and circulation. The company's buildings were revalued in September 2003, with the company's 7 North Street headquarters revalued at $264 million (in 2002 it was valued at $148 million).
Earnings per stock units on profit after taxation attributed to stockholders came in at 12 per cent, up on last year's 10 cents for the same period.
