Today and welcome to the Schibsted Group Q4 Q&A conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jo Christian Steigedal. Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah, good afternoon. This is Jo Christian Steigedal, the IR officer of Schibsted. Welcome to this Q4 Q&A session. Together with me here in Oslo are our CEO, Mr. Rolv Erik Ryssdal, and our CFO, Mr. Trond Berger, who are ready to take your questions. Schibsted today released the Q4 2011 report, showing operating revenues of 3.7 billion. There was an underlying increase of 4% compared to the same period in 2010. The online classified operations increased their revenues by 18%, whereas media houses had unchanged revenues. In Q4 2011, the EBITDA was NOK 549 million, compared to NOK 562 million in Q4 2010. This implies an unchanged EBITDA margin of 15%.
Right after this, brief introduction, we'll go straight ahead to the questions. Please, operator.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question at this time, please press the star or asterisk key followed by the digit one on your telephone. Please ensure that the mute function on your telephone is switched off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. If you find that your question has already been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Again, please press star one to ask a question. We will pause for a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal. We will now take our first question from Catherine O'Neill of Citi. Please go ahead.
Hello. I've got a couple of questions. The first one is on your investment levels for 2012. You, you said it will be similar to 2011 or somewhat higher. Could you give us an idea of what range you're thinking? Secondly, on Brazil, I just wondered if you could give us some detail on progress there and what you're seeing in terms of what the competition are doing in response.
All right. I can answer on the Brazil thing, and then Trond can answer on the range. What we're having in Brazil is we're having two companies. One is jobs company, a job portal that's called InfoJobs. You know, they are competing with other players, amongst them Catho, who is the market leader. I think, you know, since we kind of stepped up our efforts there and marketing, it's been going well for us, but I think it's early days. It's still early to tell really, you know, say anything decisive about how that will develop. We are pleased with our progress so far. The same goes for our Blocket investment named Bom Negócio.
It's really only been six, seven months that we've really been running this operation at a new pace, so to speak. You know, we're pleased with the progress. There we're seeing that especially one of the competitors is responding. When we're looking at our numbers, we're very pleased with our progress so far.
Okay.
Trond.
When it comes to the investment level, it's early days in 2012. It depends on how we actually decide to do the spending in some of the new markets like Brazil, et cetera. We don't have any further guidance, I'm sorry to say, for time being. We will give more precise guidance as a part of the Capital Day presentation, which is in the end of February.
Okay, thanks.
As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one. Please ensure the mute function on your telephone is switched off. We will now take a question from Marcus Diebel of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. It's Marcus from JPMorgan. Three questions, please. The first one is on leboncoin. Obviously, impressive performance. Is it right to assume that also probably for the next, yeah, one or two years, we won't see fees for basic listings on leboncoin? Is that something that you consider already? Second question is actually on the tax rate. Trond, if you can just guide what we should assume for 2012 because it remains relatively bumpy in the quarters. The third question is actually on Hitta. The accounting change that you had has this now played out the effect in Q4? Will we also see something going into Q1?
Maybe we have one broader question again on shareholder distribution. How do you think about, yeah, your cash level going forward, i.e., would it be acceptable for you to go also in the long run on a net cash basis like some other online players? Would you then say that we see some potential for increased shareholder distribution? Thanks a lot.
Well, I can answer your question number first, the first one. there's ample growth opportunities for leboncoin, but there are no plans to change the basic service for consumers, which is free. Now, the real estate brokers and the car dealers, they will of course pay. consumers, there it's important that the basic service will remain free. However, what's happening is that more and more are using the feature fees to get some, you know, bump up or increased exposure.
Voluntary payment. You're seeing that is increasing, but there is no plan to change the basic, service, which is to give the other ones to you, Trond, about the tax rate.
Tax rate, you're right that we had some write-down in Q4, impairment in Spain, 20 million. Actually, if you adjust that, the underlying tax rate for 2011 of 34.5%. We have spending that we don't account for tax asset as a result of spending in countries and also Scandinavia has slightly higher tax rate than 38%. In sum, this means that we will guide more to close 35% range or something in 2012. Hitta account change, now we should have cleaned up everything there. We have a new manager in charge, hopefully that should give results.
Coming to the cash levels going forward, we have a comfortable level and, we also allow ourselves, we're slightly overcapitalized. We don't have any plan to have any net cash on our books. Of course, we see some M&A possibilities as well. We would of course like that to be more focused on acquisitions within the classifieds. There aren't too many players out there, 30%.
Okay, thank you very much. Very clear.
As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one. Please ensure the mute function on your telephone is switched off for your signal to reach our equipment. We have no further questions at this time.
Okay. If there are no further questions, we will just say thank you very much for calling, and we'll talk to you later. We hope to see most of you on our Capital Markets Day in London on the 28th of February. Bye.
That will conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.