In the interview for HN daily TV Nova’s CEO Petr Dvorak presented restructuring process that is going for Czech operations. There will be four independent units with their costs and revenues – channel TV Nova, channel Galaxie, production with news section and finally journalism section. There will be other sections (i.e. marketing, sales) that will be interconnected and available for all four main units. New structure will be operational from 7 August and are mainly due to three reasons: possibility to add new channels, new regulatory framework on Nasdaq and moving TV Nova siege, which will require increased investment in technology. This year will be the year of stabilization of its operations and new formats won’t be available until next year. The programming structure for autumn will be available on Monday, therefore CEO denied to comment on this issue, stating only popular SuperStar program. CEO sees the situation on TV ad market slightly more advantageous than officially reported by TNS, which are based on official price-list. Additionally booking ad time for summer and autumn month shows that advertisers are coming back to TV Nova. Finally TV Nova will announce by the end of August its intention to launch a full-format or thematic channel.
Our view:
Restructuring process in TV Nova is getting to end. We expect that format from Romania could be successful in driving costs down also in the region of Czech Republic and Slovakia. As some formats that TV Nova’s main competitor TV Prima introduced during a summer months doesn’t have desired ratings, while TV Nova remained over 40% threshold, we see the return of advertisers as indicated by CEO to positively impact figures in second half of the year. We will look for more information about Czech operations during today’s conference call that will be hold to comment 1H2006 CME’s results at 16:00 CET.