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Earnings Call: Q3 2013

Oct 30, 2013

Rolv Erik Ryssdal
CEO, Schibsted Media Group

Welcome. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the presentation of Schibsted's results for Q3. Very recently, we've had very extensive capital market days, both in London and New York. Many of those of you who are here today were with us there. We've had a very detailed review of the company, the different parts of it, and strategic direction, so that the performance that we're presenting today does not include very many significant surprises related to that. What you'll be hearing from Trond and myself, I don't think there are any great surprises there. We'll in fact, it'll be a little bit shorter than usual. We're very pleased to have Torry Pedersen, the publisher of VG, with us, and he'll be telling us a little bit about how things are going with the digital transition in VG, and he'll be the spice for this presentation.

Our agenda looks like this. I'll be taking you through the Q3 highlights, Torry will be talking about the digital transition, Trond, the CFO, will be speaking about the financials. To take a look at the headlines for classifieds, there are no big news items. The profit and the sales trends for the major sites are continuing as previously. We have good growth all across the portfolio. In Spain, there is a little bit of negative development otherwise, but the top line growth there is affected there slightly. The large sites, Norway, Sweden and France, continue to deliver results. Many of these others, established market leaders, are getting to be really exciting, I can tell you. In Spain, I'm going to be talking a little bit about that. There we're focusing on getting growth to gain momentum again.

We're happy with the new joint venture with Telenor. That will allow us to do more and do it more quickly. We are continuing with our investments in organic growth at a high level. We have good growth in the traffic all across the portfolio. For the media houses, we're also seeing the trend continuing with the digital development that's taking place very rapidly. What I think is really exciting for the media houses is that there's a lot of product development, both digitally and for the print media, we'll be talking more about that. Otherwise, we see a stable and good trend, both when it comes to revenues and profits. Very briefly, I'm going to touch on the figures here. You can see that our operating profit before investments is up by about 4%. This is on par with last quarter.

We see that there's top line growth here as well. I'm very well satisfied with the result that we're presenting today. The margin X investment is staying at a high level, also as expected. We're seeing that it is going down a little bit there because investments have increased. Let's look at the composition here of revenues and results. You see that classifieds is increasing its share. Now it's about 30% of sales. Otherwise it's interesting to see how fast is the total sales trend. We see now that almost 50%, 48% is digital. A year ago, it was 42%. Last quarter, 45%. We see that the online share of the profit, it's even stronger. It's 50% before investments and up to 2/3 for classifieds alone.

Now I'm talking about when this is adjusted for the investments, the new ventures. That that's a really exciting development trend. Let's take a look at classifieds then. When we started during the last in capital markets day, we grouped these things this way, and I will take you through the highlights for the largest sites. We're seeing other established. These are sites that have taken a position in the market. They're at break even. We're saying that we're going to continue to develop in them, continue to invest and win more market share, because we know that the larger market share we have, the more exciting it is. We've proven this with FINN Blocket and Leboncoin. I think this trend is very exciting in Ireland. We've done well for a long time.

Italy is doing increasingly better, also in Austria with Willhaben. I'm also going to talk a little bit about Spain and what's going on there. We have what we call the investment phase, where we are investing fairly heavily. I think that's a very exciting portfolio, the way it's put together now, and it gives us a platform for future growth. FINN.no just continues to impress me, and I hope you as well. They are continuing to grow on several markets. FINN has gotten so large that it actually is impacted by macro conditions in Norway. If we see anything that's weaker in the third quarter, it's the job market. Little bit slightly down now than in Q3 last year. Property real estate on FINN has gone well. We're seeing increases still.

I think while the market, the housing market, has started to taper off a little bit now, where FINN is seeing the effect that people are advertising even more and longer. Otherwise, for FINN, we're seeing that there's good development in the brands announcements at commercials, and we've had a good development in the new iPad and iPhone app. In the recent quarter, we see that there are a lot of downloads of this, and the traffic development is also very good. We see also there are certain events that Christian asked me to remind you of because of the high market activity and the announcements in Q4 and a lot of several, one time, one-off effects in Q4 that's going to have an impact on the comparison between Q13 and the year-on-year results, Q4 2012.

Blocket is doing well, Blocket is dependent very much on the car market in Sweden, and that's fairly flat. While professional commercials, the display advertising is increasing, like FINN, they're making adjustments for new products so that when they're advertising some new products that need more exposure and so on, then you see that there's a better price involved in that. There's a lot of exciting product development in Blocket. They're going to have a new iOS app in Q4. There are many things taking place in the property market there, real estate, where Blocket now has a large part of or a large share of the objects in Sweden on its site.

The reason that the margins are dipping a little bit is because of the product development investments. I think that's entirely right, and we're going to continue with that. Let's look at Leboncoin. This is a very well-established and well-run company that is developing well. I think that's especially fun to see that if we look at the traffic growth of the advertising, the new advertising are still growing strongly. We have a very strong position in the car market, auto market, and taking even more market share there. As we mentioned on Capital Market Day, we also have a promising position in the real estate market, which in the longer term can result in some very exciting developments. Leboncoin just continues to grow and grow and grow.

Now we're seeing that for the advertising of brand names, we're seeing tougher figures than last year than what we had previously, and that has an impact on the growth rate. I'm very well satisfied with Leboncoin and the underlying development there. There are some other sites, Spain, for example. Well, we're very well satisfied with what we've done in Q3 there. We have taken over the full operation of the Spanish activity. Today, there are four or five managers with background from SDM, from FINN, from Blocket, and they're part of the new executive management group in Spain. It'll be very exciting to see what happens in the market. As far as the macro economy goes, it's difficult to make predictions, but maybe the outlook is a little bit more positive now.

I see the Spanish National Bank said they were out of the recession, that will be exciting. As far as competition goes, there's a lot that has taken place in Spain, and we have some very keen competition. We said, "Well, what we have to look at now is to get the traffic figures to pick up again." This means that we're going to give up or perhaps leave behind some of the sales, and we'll be focusing more on marketing. We'll say, "Okay, it's not the short-term results in Spain that are important, it's the long-term market position," and that's what we're investing in. I think this is really interesting and exciting to follow along with, I have to say.

As far as the other sites that are in this class, Italy, Ireland, and Austria, which I've already mentioned, they have very good trends when it comes to the advertising. Our investment portfolio, most of it is already covered by the new joint ventures that we have with Telenor and with Singapore Press Holdings. I believe this is going to enable us to do a lot more and a lot more quickly. This is a very exciting portfolio, and there are a number of you that have asked us, so how is things going with the sites? We have to say, well, because of the disclosure limitations due to competition, there's a limit to what we can say, but I can show you this, that how things are going with new ads compared to previous periods.

It's the advertising that is exciting here, even though there is, it's free. Our quality is very high. We do examine them before they come online. I think that this portfolio is very well-positioned for future growth. I think the expertise that Telenor is bringing into this in mobile developments in emerging markets is going to lift us up even further, and that makes us even stronger when it comes to our funding base and financial base from which we operate. That was what I wanted to say about classifieds at this point. I'm going to then move on to the media houses, and there's tremendous activity taking place there. Those of you who read our products will no doubt have taken note of that.

Financially, we see stable income, stable revenues, the online part is growing so that the online share of revenues for Norway and Sweden together is now up to about 25%. We're experimenting a bit with digital payment models, and we are focusing on growing our digital revenues, both for classifieds and also for user revenues. I'm going to go into this and give you a few more details. Otherwise, it's important to say that in Norway and Sweden, we see that the beacons in the brands are VG and Aftenbladet, VG in Norway, Aftenbladet in Sweden. They've had a tremendous development, both in the number of visitors and their digital revenues. We see that their digital revenues are up to about two-thirds of the total revenues, and this is a development that I'm very pleased with.

Especially mobile's incomes has grown considerably and also web TV, online television. If we look at the subscription-based newspapers, and we're looking at these online revenues have grown by 30% so that the print income we see is still much larger. Going down 13%, that's quite a decline. Because we've worked with efficiency measures and cost-cutting measures, we've certainly taken that into account and compensated for it. What is really exciting here is the product development that we're seeing, and there I feel that our media houses are really good, and they're right at the forefront of developments. If we look at now some of the subscription-based houses, VG, for example, there's always stuff going on. Fædrelandsvennen was the first payment newspapers, and that has led to increase and then a flattening out.

In Stavanger, Bergens Tidende just a few weeks ago introduced its payment model, and they're doing this also with the help of our payment systems, SPID, and that's worked very well, in fact. Thus far, where we previously had circulation, we were losing circulation. Now there are more people that are signing up for the digital subscriptions, and the models are a little bit different from city to city, depending on local conditions. We're not just doing this on the digital side. We also have a lot of product development in the print media. In Fædrelandsvennen and Bergens Tidende we have a more compact newspaper now. Every time you make changes like this, I think we're prepared for this, so we shouldn't underestimate the significance that newspapers have in people's day-to-day lives.

When you go from two parts to one part, there are reactions, and the editors have been prepared for that. This is something that helps get people engaged. At the same time, we feel that it's very exciting to look at the new magazine that has been introduced, and it's been very positively received, very welcomed. The Fædrelandsvennen and Bergens Tidende now have this online, and Aftenposten is going to do the same thing in the course of November. Developments take place quickly here. They are going to be choosing a slightly different model that is adapted more to the Oslo market. There's a lot going on there. By way of conclusion, I'll say a little bit about the growth media, Tillväxtmedia. There has been a good development in revenues there, good revenue growth. We see that personal finance is growing there.

Hitta has had some a change in income, and we're now taking some new steps in Hitta. This is the equivalent of FINN.no. We have good ideas for developments in Hitta. We ran through in Q3 we completed the acquisition of Compricer.se, and we feel that this will give us even a further base for growth in the future in the personal finance market in Sweden. This is really exciting, and what we see in Norway too, as we introduce Lendo and the money.no, penger.no, these are promising, but it's still early days. That was what I wanted to say about the media houses. I am very pleased to give the floor to Torry Pedersen, the publisher of VG, who's in the front lines here, and he can tell us about developments, especially for VG.

Torry Pedersen
the publisher, VG

Well, as Rolv Erik Ryssdal said, things for VG are going well, and perhaps this is surprising for those who read Norwegian media comments that have a strange ability to over-focus on the paper development when we're right in the middle of a digital revolution. I'm going to try a little bit to explain about why things are going so well for VG right now. One important thing is that we've never spoken to more people than we do now or reached a larger audience. Compared to the peak for the newspaper reading of VG, we actually reach 70% more people. That's a million people. A million people extra each day is certainly something that has a value. It's not such that it doesn't have any value.

It's a very great value, in fact, and that's very significant for us that we've managed to increase the reach to the audience to almost 2.4 million readers every single day. What we see is taking place the most rapidly is the mobile market, where we've gone from pretty much 0 to 1 million readers a day in just 4 or 5 years. What's worthy of note there is that in week 42 in 2011, 75% of our digital traffic was from desktop PCs, and last year, the same traffic was from a desktop, 64%. Now 50% is from desktop. You can guess what it will be in 2014. My bet is that the majority of them will be from mobile platforms. The fact that our reach is so much broader is very important for us.

Because of the position that we have achieved digitally online, we are the largest player in the commercial media market in Norway in the age group 12- 59 years, which especially important for us is the demographic from 20- 39. We see that VG has reaches 68%, TV 2, 58. I'm talking about contact points, not the time that's spent on the media. There we have reason to believe that people still look more at television than at other media platforms, this is absolutely of inestimable value. When Rolv Erik was at the helm of VG, he said we were going to meet 58% of the people every day, we thought that was really a stretch. Now we're actually doing that in the age group, the demographic from 12- 59.

We're reaching out to more than that, there's nothing with the people. The demographic above 60 is that when the older people come over that age limit, they'll be also following along with us. I think we're a little bit running behind with only 40% behind 60 years. Some people have told us that in the commercial market, 20-40 is especially important. Now we have a really, really good position in that demographic. The third thing that's happening is that very quietly, we have managed to develop VG Plus, this is actually Norway's 11th largest newspaper when it comes to circulation, pay, paying subscribers.

We surpassed Sunnmørsposten last week, and now we're going to go past Romerikes Blad, which is the 10th, and then we're going to start climbing that particular ladder and raising our circulation rates there. For us, what's really important for us here is VG Weekend, VG Helg. VG Weekend has an impact in the paper market. We've increased our figures there by 18%, our revenues, and we are still winning market share in the paper market on Saturday. VG Helg is part of our digital strategy because what we're in the process of understanding is that there is a difference between articles that result in a lot of traffic and articles that you're willing to pay for. We're in the process of breaking that code, and VG Weekend is part of that.

We're using articles from VG Weekend and putting them into VG+. Something that's been in VG Weekend on Saturday, for example, this boy here, we can publish 3 or 4 days afterwards in VG+ and get several hundred new subscribers in just one day. We have no problem getting new subscribers. What we have to work with is working with the newsstand versions. Next week we're gonna have a stand in Gothenburg. What we're going to be working with next year, in particular, is television. Why is it that we are going to be working with television? This is absolutely essential to understand this particular slide. These are figures from last year, Norwegians are very technologically focused. We have 36% of all Norwegians have a PC, a smartphone, and a tablet.

If you go to the U.S., that figure is about 25%. You go to Japan, it's less than 10%. There's been a lot of talk about second screen, that you call the mobile a second screen. We would see or we're convinced actually that the mobile is the first screen. When we're seeing this particular development trend, it's easier and easier to see live broadcasts from any of these different devices because we're getting better broadband coverage, other technology. The most important thing when we're looking at television and focusing on that, this shows the viewer time for the different TV channels. If you look at NRK1, this is Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, 70% of their viewers are over 50 years. If you look at TV 2, it's almost 70% of the viewers are over 40.

If you look at VGTV, 73% of the viewers are under 40 years of age. Naturally, there are more people that look at NRK, the National Broadcasting Corporation, but I've learned that the share market looks at expectations too and takes them into account. This is where we feel that we kind of have a goldmine when we're thinking of the future. We are speaking to this age group, addressing this age group with live images. What we're going to be doing in 2014 is what we call the VGTV Doubles. We're going to double the staff. We're going to double the video inventory. We're going to acquire program series and shows. We're going to get even better at news, the effect of that is that we'll have more content for our viewers.

Equally important, we'll have a more predictable inventory for advertisers because we'll have more stable viewer number. The news vary a bit from day to day, but if you have a good, stable, and predictable base of viewers, that's important for us. If we're going to go into the TV media, we have to be disruptive, as disruptive as we can because those who have been in the TV industry for years, they know what they're doing. We're learning. This is Mads Andersen who's interviewing Stoltenberg and Erna Solberg. Here, he himself is sitting there in the editing room. Frithjof Jacobsen is commenting on the election campaign. He's got an iPad that he has set on this little backpack there and a cell phone and a microphone, and that's fine. That's what he's doing. When we produce television, we have every weight class.

As you can see, sometimes we use a helicopter and other big equipment. I'm going to show you an example in just a moment. We were, in fact, the first in the world to use this backpack for live transmissions. The point is that if you download an app on your iPhone and you're someplace where something is going on, and our reporter has done this, it will go straight into our control room automatically, so that we can take the feed immediately if people have used that application. We also use iPhones in our TV production. We have to do this more cheaply. We have to do it disruptively in relation to other players. This is one of my favorite slides that I'm showing you here. This was the bombing in Boston.

The same day, Justin Bieber was on the way to Telenor Arena, a concert venue in Oslo. Most people would say that the bombing in Oslo was the most important thing that took place. I agree with that. That's at the top. For 200,000 teenage girls, it was just as important that Justin Bieber was on his way to Telenor Arena, so that we did. We went up in a helicopter and did the same thing just like they did with the Boston bombing. With a third event, we could have sent, broadcast that at the same time. Linear TV can't do that. None of the journalist teachers would understand, perhaps the traditionalists would understand how important this is.

On an ordinary day, 5% of the first page traffic in the evening is girls between 12 and 15, 12 and 19 years of age, and 7% are boys. Espen Egil had this really good idea of finding this figure. What we found in our entertainment section, which was 25% of the traffic, was between 12 and 19 years. This demographic were girls and then 7% of boys in the same age group. That's natural because we were writing about Justin Bieber. Do you know how the traffic was divided on our foreign section? 25% of the traffic was girls between 12 and 19 years of age, and 13% boys. I think that that has a tremendous value that you can manage to get this age group and draw them in to read that particular thing.

They come in to read about Justin Bieber. Then they end up looking at the news. I think that I can focus on the NSA disclosures and find it entertaining at the same time. As long as we can do that, have one door open another and focus on the young people, this is really vital. As you know, Schibsted has a lot of a big initiative when it comes to the use of data for web TV. This is absolutely essential. The data capture for TV gives you the material for delivering advertising to specific commercial groups. We're not there yet, but we'll get there. This is as opposed to linear television. This also has a great value to us, or is of great value to us. By way of conclusion, this is from the American market.

I would underline that. It's possible that there would be more clutter on ordinary TV there than in Norway. If we are to believe the Nielsen ratings, these are how people perceive the advertising, the commercials on web TV compared with ordinary television. Here we also have a unique opportunity that would allow us to move more money from traditional TV over to online TV. This is one of our major campaigns in 2014. I think it's correct to say that this is the largest investment that we're making since we established VG Multimedia back in the year 2000. We really believe that the TV market is going to be moving into a disruptive phase. Trond, the CFO.

Trond Berger
CFO, VG

Thank you very much, Torry. If we take a look at the figures for Q3, we're very well satisfied with the results.

This is Mr. Trond Berger, the CFO. Also for the traditional media houses, we've seen good developments in a market where there's a lot of migration. For classifieds, as we say, we have 13% underlying growth. If we adjust for Spain, it's 17% growth on the top line. Then the established FINN, Blocket and Leboncoin are still delivering very well and on a par with what we've seen in the developments previously. If we look at the developments between the Q3 2012 and 2013, the same period, this is explained by having a stable development in Norway. Again, when you see what actually takes place in the print market with the growth at the same time in online and digital growth, this is a good result.

Sweden has been a little bit more volatile in the third quarter. The volatility there that we've seen has been. We've seen a slightly lower growth in Growth Media, for example. Now with the acquisitions Compricer and using the dealing with personal finance differently, we see a lot of new opportunities opening up for the future. Otherwise, there's more spending of NOK 109 million that explains that we believe that there are a lot of opportunities out there in new markets as increased investment. We have good cost control at the same time as we're continuing to spend a lot on digital media, so that if you look at our cost trends compared with Q3 a year ago, this year's compared with last year's, we have some currency effects that we see there.

Especially the euro has strengthened, but it's especially the adjustments in the growth companies that we see there. The classifieds explain a large part of this, and we're also continuing to reduce our costs in our established activities. I would just remind you a little bit of what we have done. We had this program that was concluded in 2011. This is NOK 1.7 billion in cost investments and efficiency improvements, and we actually did better than that. We have an ongoing program for 2013 and 2014, which is for NOK 500 million, the efficiency program, so that these are a great deal of cost efficiency measures.

We don't have any plans for any major restructuring programs, but we'll be making a lot of little tweaking and focus a little bit more, and we'll get some smaller restructuring projects in future, but not the major program that we have had for the past two, three years. At the moment, we have no plans for anything comparable. We have the income statement for Schibsted that shows a EBITDA of NOK 437 compared with NOK 513 last year-over-year. Again, there's NOK 109 million in increased investment in the online classifieds and new ventures. We have sold our businesses in the Baltic States in Q3, that there was a loss of a little bit more than NOK 200 million, which we're also recognizing under other items on the income statement.

Otherwise, we have stable developments in the financial expenses. We also have a very high tax rate as a result of the fact that we're not getting any deductions for this, the loss on SD Media. It's not tax-deductible. The investments that we're making in emerging markets is not a tax advantage in The accounts there were conservative so that the deficits there are something that will be carried forward. We have a strong financial position, which is also very stable. We have a maturity that runs for five years and even longer. We have a net interest-bearing liabilities of NOK 1.5. As a result of precisely the good cash flow in Q4 and the agreement with Telenor, this ratio is going to be changed and be significantly better. We have an underlying good cash flow also in this quarter.

Otherwise, I would just remind you that we signed an agreement with Telenor, and it is such that it's called SNT, and this is estimated at EUR 180. It's what our stake is worth, especially in South America. There is a 50/50 distribution, joint and equal ownership, and we expect that this will close in early December, the way it looks now. There might be a little adjustment here. We'll get in NOK 119 million in positive cash flow there. This also means there have been business plans that are used as the basis for this, for our discussions. We'll have the cash in Telenor and Schibsted, it's possible to get some cash cows operating here. Based on a new standard in 2014, joint venture accounting, we'll have to use that.

We won't take the gross consolidation on a line-by-line basis, but we can take everything on one line. When we start out with, as our investments are still large, this will be a minus post on one line in the EBITDA, but the figure will be growing and positive, but we wanna give pro forma information to the market about what the line breakdown would be. In Asia, we're in the 701 countries, and this is where we have equity method of closing, and we've gotten Telenor in, so there's a tripartite. With SPH and Telenor and Schibsted, this is a tripartite venture. The new structure then looks like this. If we look at the online classifieds, we have 90% of FINN.

That will be 100% of the established and investment phase operations that are outside this joint venture, then 50/50 with Telenor in South America and certain markets in Asia. We have the tripartite cooperation in Asia, the 701Search Pte. Ltd., ,and Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines and Vietnam are our major campaigns there. We will end with the structure of reporting for the future. We have established in Schibsted Norge a distribution company that's going to be split off. The spin-off will show the figures there, and you can see that that will not be part of the media activities in future.

Rolv Erik Ryssdal
CEO, Schibsted Media Group

Otherwise, on Investor Day, we also mentioned that we're seeing that it's difficult to have a distribution between the digital and paper media in the traditional media houses because our editorial staffs they're dovetailing here so that we will continue to have a breakdown on the revenues between digital and print, but not on the profit and loss level because this dovetails so strongly, and it's becoming more and more one unit. Then I will give the floor back to President and CEO Rolv Erik Ryssdal to take us through the prospects for the future, the outlook.

All right. For the classifieds site, we believe that there will still be continued growth for the established sites. I would remind you that FINN and Blocket are so large that they will be dependent on the cyclical development.

Leboncoin, I believe, will see positive, very positive developments there. Also, we have to bear in mind that they also are going to be running into more difficult figures as time passes. This has become a very large company. Have to just bear this in mind. The underlying activities in Leboncoin they are very healthy. We're going to continue to development in the new sites that we've got. We have faith in them. We believe that this is a good long-term growth foundation that we have there, and we believe that that will continue to be at a high level, and we'll continue to invest next year. As regards Spain, I've touched on that briefly.

There we are going to be focusing on regaining the momentum in our growth and more traffic, and we're going to be focusing on this through increasing our market shares. This is going to have an impact on profitability and on our top-line revenues. Otherwise, in the media houses, as you understand, the digital transition is continuing full speed ahead, and I'm very pleased with what's taking place in the media houses when it comes to product development, both for print as well as for the online presence. I think we are poised for very exciting and wonderful development in the years ahead. That was what we wanted to present to you today. We will open the floor to questions.

Torry Pedersen
the publisher, VG

Will the new government in Norway have any impact on Schibsted with their media policy? Well, it'll be exciting to see what they offer.

We are hoping that they're going to be reducing or preferably take away the VAT on digital media. We have a little hope about that. Otherwise, we are waiting to see what they're going to do with the ownership regulations. We've said that we support the press support policy that has been employed thus far, and we feel that, it helps to support the diversity of the Norwegian media. Martin Stenshall, Danske Bank. A little bit more about VG.

Martin Stenshall
Credit Analyst, Danske Bank.

Thank you, Tori. That was very interesting. Can you say anything about the level of the investments you're planning to spend on especially VGTV? Could you say a little bit more about exactly how big the VGTV really is?

Torry Pedersen
the publisher, VG

When it comes to the figures, we're not going to disclose the figures for that. In 2014, it'll be a few tens of millions of NOK that we will be contributing. This first phase, when we're really building up operations, I think that it's important in order to give future revenues or generate future revenues. When it comes to the income generated by that area, we see that there will be significant income generated in 2014, but the result will probably continue to be negative. A little bit about Spain, please. Another question. It'll be exciting to see what you can manage to accomplish with this turnaround operation with your Spanish assets. Can you say anything about the timeframe, the timeline for increasing growth there? Perhaps a little bit about the margins there, what you envisage.

Well, we've already implemented a number of measures to make our products a little bit easier, simpler. We want to have more advertising, of course, a little bit we're doing this autumn. Then we will have the larger initiatives will be implemented next year and the following year, so that our revenues will be filtering through to our revenues, especially in 2015. I think you'll see a very marked effect of that, so that in 2015 and beyond that, we'll see a really good development there.

We have some questions from the web. First of all, as regards the media house activities, VG has turned in very good results. Are there any newspaper activities where we feel that they're not making the transition to the digital area and where the media might be sold? Would you repeat that, please? Are there any of the media houses that are not managing the digital transition?

No, I'm very satisfied with the transition. I feel that our media houses are very well-positioned. Of course, it'll be demanding, there's no doubt about that, but they seem to be doing very well. I feel that we have the expertise and we have products that are well-positioned.

Is it possible to say anything about the growth rate in Italy? Is it twice as high as in France or more or less? Secondly, starting up an activity. You've started up a business in Ghana. Is this a first foothold in Africa? The situation in Italy will have two focuses, the Italian economy and the media situation.

We've traditionally focused on traffic growth, and we'll continue to do that. Then we have some experiments that we're carrying on in certain countries, and we've done that for several years. We are experimenting. For example, it's remotely controlled by Stockholm to see if there's promising development. I don't wanna go into any of those countries in particular right now. Question: What is the cash flow effect when it comes to the sale of Eesti Meedia? Answer: It's about EUR 30 million.

Rolv Erik Ryssdal
CEO, Schibsted Media Group

More questions? I know there are many of you who have a busy day, so I'll say thank you very much for being here, and thank you for following along with the web.

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