PL media: Zenith cuts its forecasts for PL ad market down to the consensus

ZenithOptimedia Group has revised its forecasts for Poland’s advertising market downwards for full-year 2012: the current estimate stands at a 4.9% y/y contraction versus the previous guidance of a 0.7% y/y loss. The media house expects Poland’s TV ad market to lose 6.1% y/y, dailies to contract 18.7% y/y and outdoor to decline 5.6% y/y in 2012. On the positive side, online is expected to gain 8% y/y in 2012.

The media house assumes that Poland will underperform the eurozone ad market’s average decline of 3.1% in 2012. Eurozone ad markets are expected to gain an average 0.9% in 2013 and 2.3% in 2014.

We see the news as neutral: the broker has simply revised its previous´outdated guidance down to the consensus. Zenith’s forecasts are more pessimistic than our forecast of a 3% deterioration in Poland’s overall ad market in 2012, which is the consequence of Zenith’s slightly lower assumptions for all major ad segments. Despite Zenith’s forecasts being slightly lower than our assumptions, we still see the news as neutral. If we applied Zenith’s expectations to our models for TVN and Cyfrowy Polsat, a 1pp lower assumption for Poland’s TV ad market in 2012 (we expect the TV ad market to fall 5% y/y in 2012 while Zenith expects a 6.1% y/y contraction) would translate into lower EBITDA at both firms by roughly PLN 3m-5m in the scale of full-year 2012. In both cases, this would translate into a cut of less than 1% in the full-year EBITDA forecasts for both Polsat and TVN. Our expectation for the growth in Poland’s TV ad market in 2013 and 2014 is in line with Zenith’s expectations for ad market growth in Europe in the next two years.