3 months ago
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After reporting annual losses of $529 million, media and technology company Radio Jamaica Limited, which trades as RJRGLEANER Communications Group, said in a statement to shareholders that it has “embarked on an ambitious transformation journey to drive future growth and success”.
Key to the process is a five-point strategy that includes the hiring of consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers to design target operating model, referred to as TOM. It will span all elements of the group, whose primary businesses include Radio Jamaica, Television Jamaica and The Gleaner newspaper, among other holdings.
The process is expected to result in fundamental changes in the way the company does business, including its structure, processes and policies.
In addition, RJRGLEANER is touting the group’s implementation of NextGen TV, or ATSC 3.0, under its DSO or digital switchover programme. Up to the end of June, more than two-thirds of Jamaica’s population was covered by the digital TV network, the group said. The group has also been investing in print operations to increase operational efficiency and reliability, it said.
In an interview following the release of the company’s delayed results, Group CEO Anthony Smith said two other key elements of the transformation plan were the human resource function and revenue generation.
“On the HR side, we want to improve engagement and collaboration first of all. The fifth strategy has to do with improved revenue and that will come from better utilisation of existing assets and the addition of new revenue streams,” Smith said on Thursday.
He also cited an ongoing programme of alternative utilisation of physical assets, saying RJRGLEANER Group is in the process of renting out at least two floors of the five-storey Gleaner Building at North Street, Kingston, while consolidating departments on two other floors.
“We’ll get revenue from leasing out the space that we’re no longer using; that is just one way of better utilising our physical assets,” said the chief executive, who succeeded Gary Allen as group boss in January.
“In addition, there are our digital assets and how we monetise them,” Smith added, citing the additional channels and the opportunities for datacasting that’s embodied in DSO.
“That’s a brand-new revenue stream that we’ll be monetising. We don’t want to say much, but the digital television signal can also transmit data and that’s as much as I will say at this time,” he said.
For the year ending March 2024, the RJRGLEANER Group barely made gains in revenue, which inched up from $5.43 billion to $5.49 billion.
However, its cost of doing business, administrative spending and one-off losses pushed the company deep into red. The group made a loss of $567 million, which was partially alleviated with $38 million of tax credits. Its net loss of $528.75 million was a sharp turnaround from profit of $250 million at year ending March 2023.
Still, RJRGLEANER Group was only able to make a profit in FY2023 because of a one-off gain of $444 million that resulted from the acquisition of 1834 Investments Limited and its property holdings.
“If you remove that one-off gain, then we would have been at about a $200-million loss for 2023. Therefore, the $529-million loss for this year comes more into perspective considering what happened in the previous year,” Smith said.
The losses in the current period also include impaired trade receivables, totalling $113 million, which Smith said reflected the state of play in the advertising marketplace and the fact that liquidity was tight.
Going forward, the CEO said the group would face a greater level of depreciation charges because of its investments, but would also have new opportunities to make money.
“When you roll out that investment on DSO then it will be accompanied by depreciation but with it comes the opportunity to make more revenue,” Smith said, adding that the capital expenditures over the past two years were embarked on “to put the company in a position to deliver to the market”.
“So it is short-term pain, but long-term gain,” he said.
Meanwhile, it is in the process of changing its chief financial officer.
It was announced in May that CFO Andrea Messam would take early retirement, effective December 2024. Subsequently, the group announced that Karla Stephens-Hall joined RJRGLEANER as CFO-designate and started working there on July 8.
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