The time is 9:00 A.M., that means it's time to welcome you to Schibsted's presentation of the results for the second quarter. As usual, it's Trond and I who are here for the presentation, there are also other members of management who are here, they can supplement our information if you have questions or comments that requires their expertise. 2011 highlights here. This was a good quarter for Schibsted. Remember that last year in the second quarter, we had a very strong performance, this was colored by the fact that we had a cost-cutting program because we had better economic prospects, so that we managed performance of about NOK 650 million. The fact that we have beat that with higher investment levels this year, it really gives me great satisfaction.
The underlying growth is about 6% top line growth. If we look at the largest contributor for the improvement, it's the online classifieds. It is in particular the large established organizations that are contributing. This is FINN.no, it's Blocket, Annonces, and perhaps in particular, leboncoin, and we'll come back to that in a moment. There are also a number of companies that we have talked about previously that are at the level below this one. This is in Italy, Austria, and Malaysia. All of these traction phase companies, these three now had a positive result in the second quarter. That may not be the case for the whole year this year, but for all of next year, we are assuming that that will be the case. This is a good development trend.
This makes us comfortable with the rollouts that we have here that have resulted in a decision to have a launch in Brazil. I'll come back to that. Advertising markets in Scandinavia, they have been very good, but it was in particular in April and May that were really strong, and then things slowed down a little bit in June and July, and I'll come back to that as well. Otherwise, I can just say that there's strong traffic growth in the mobile market, and this applies to all of our services, both the online classifieds and not least the media houses. The highlights look like this, 6% growth in the underlying change here at the top line, and a margin that's comparable to last year's in the same interim period.
As regards the media houses, they've grown 3%, also at a level on a par with last year. Some are doing better, and some are doing a little bit more poorly than last year. I'll talk about that. At the international level, we see that things are still hard going in Spain, but that in Estonia, things are better as they are in France. Online classifieds. Here I would say that we've included a line that shows what the margins are for the major operations. Perhaps this is not a great surprise. I think it's worth pointing out that the large major activities are also growing by more than 20%, and we're very well satisfied with this.
Here you can see the revenue split, where all of the revenues are generated. It's worthy of note that online classifieds now accounts for 24% of the total revenues. If you add the digital activities of the media houses, we're up in 36%. What has gone down over time has been the single copy sales. This picture shows the trend in the profit from last year's NOK 652 million to this year's NOK 683 million. We see that Norway has progressed somewhat. Schibsted Sweden has declined slightly. It is in particular the online classifieds in the established channels that has increased here. Because we are well satisfied with this situation, we have increased our investment levels for the rollout of Blocket by NOK 28 million. This is during this quarter compared with last year.
This is why we have ended up with the NOK 683 million in performance. I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about online classifieds. Here you can see where the margins are generated for the established ones. This is these four lines. Because we have written off all of the investments used for advertising, the overall result is then 37%, the overall margin, and with top line growth of 22%. When we go into the individual business activities in FINN.no, I see Christian is here, the head of FINN.no. I'll say the same to him as I said to you, I'm very impressed by the development in FINN.no. This growth is really good, 48% EBITDA margin growth.
If we look at the different groups here, we see that the recruitment announcements or recruitment ads, job vacancies have grown significantly. This is mainly growth in volume, and also the cars, automotive has been strong in Norway and Sweden. We see that FINN.no Has had a very good development also in travel verticals. When we looked at the terror attack in Norway, we see that traffic has increased significantly. FINN.no Hasn't taken so much, hasn't seen this so much, but the others then picked up considerably. FINN.no Then has a brand advertising that shows headway of 31%. They're doing very well, and they have done for quite some time. Otherwise, there's a very strong pace of innovation throughout FINN.no. In particular, we're also looking at the mobile platforms. I'll move on then to Blocket.
Blocket is developing very well during the second quarter. Here we can see that there is growth in revenues of 11%, and there's an underlying growth that's in fact 16%, and this is related to the discontinuation of group internal revenues. This sounds complicated, but it is because previously, leboncoin used to pay a fee to Blocket based on traffic, and it was very high. When we then acquired the rest of the company, then we changed the model and replaced it with perhaps a simpler model. The point here is that the underlying growth for Blocket is on a very good track, and in particular, cars have done well. I think we had an all-time high for cars in May. Blocket also works with development.
On the first of August, there was a launch of the new job vertical. It's got a good start as well as I can tell. The strategy is to break into this market. There's lower prices that are offered there for the for job ads than many of our competitors have. As regards to real estate, we're also working with Blocket for taking a more advanced position there. Just it was one year ago, there was e-handel was e-commerce. It was first introduced. That's right on track. Some time has been spent now on trying to figure out which categories are best, where should we focus, where should we pull back a little bit, but it should provide a positive contribution to our profits as time passes. Let us then move on to the situation in Spain and France.
The heading here is for France, is that there's very strong growth. I'll come back to this. The heading for Spain is that they have a satisfactory performance and development in a very, very difficult market. Indeed, Anuntis is doing very well and is growing. In fact, it is growing by more than 10%. What we see is that it is in particular the verticals. Verticals are what the word we use to describe housing, for example, is real estate site. Cars, automotives are another. It is in particular these two verticals that are doing very well there. If we look at cars, the sales are increasing despite the fact that the new car sales in Spain they've really slowed down in Spain for five years now.
It's the build manufacturers are now also promoting their new cars on our website, and I think that's great. The InfoJobs unemployment in Spain is high, and it's not easy to work there, but InfoJobs is a company that's doing very well. It's got good earnings. They have a stable development trend. They have almost as many jobs in their job bank as they had two or three years ago. We see no clear signs in one direction or the other. We would like to say that there were more positive signs, for example, that the IT industry has picked up in InfoJobs, but that's not enough to say that there's to give a prognosis based on these very minor signs. It looks that like things are picking up. InfoJobs does well and is earning good money.
I'm going to use a little extra time on leboncoin. I would say, Terje will be talking about this as well. We're not going to show this in such detail from next year, but we feel that right now we have a responsibility for explaining what's going on, and here I'm referring to the acquisition. It is because of the competition rules that we can't give more detailed information, but I can say that things are going even better than what we assumed they would do, would be doing when we bought the 50%, the other 50% in November. There were about 30 or 40 employees in the company at that time, and now they're almost 100. We have a professional group of managers, and I believe that this group is dealing with this growth very well.
When income is growing, revenues are growing by 70%, this has to really be described as good. I think after the end of the quarter, things have continued to grow. What we're doing now is to take this very strong position and use it in a different way. We are addressing professional customers now. There have always been some car dealers on leboncoin, now we have developed a new product which addresses the car dealerships. We know from other markets that this is really a good idea. In Blocket, we had just the private cars, the cars that were sold by private individuals, now we have the industry is also part of this. This is a product that we have great faith in, it is one of the exciting opportunities that presents itself in this company.
I'd like to talk a little bit more about classifieds. Today, we can tell you that we have made an investment in Brazil. We have a launch there, a Blocket site that has been launched there. I would underscore that this isn't something that we're starting from scratch. When we took over Annonces, five years ago, the company already for several years had had extensive activities in Latin America. These sites have continued to be operated. Some of them have been paper, some have been closed down. We have reported all the time that we have activities in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, also some in Colombia. This entails an increased focus on Brazil. We have the site that is number two, divided second place in the job market. This is InfoJobs Brazil.
What we're doing now is focusing much more on the generalist market with this new brand that's Bom Negócio. We are not starting from scratch, as I say. We have 355,000 ads on the site, and we're going to continue to develop it. We have used the Blocket platform here, and we've built a new organization so that we've really focused on this new organization compared to what we had. Now we know a lot about the market, and we have had a good overview of it, and we have taken one of the brightest managers that we've had in Europe. He's from Holland, and he's taken along his family and moved to Brazil, and he's at the forefront of building up this local team there in Brazil.
Brazil is a very exciting market, I have to say. It's growing very quickly. The in-internet rate is growing rapidly. Penetration is growing rapidly. There are signs that indicate that this is very appropriate for having a classified site like Blocket here. Of course, this is a very large market, and Brazil is almost like a continent in itself, in fact. Even now, we feel that we have systematized the experience that we have. We're going to be following along with developments very closely here. The, the management group will be using a lot of time on development. It's a very exciting opportunity, I have to say. I'm just going to give you a recap here for online classifieds. We will continue to develop.
We have this established phase, we then want to move those that are in the investment phase, this traction phase, we want to push them up into the established phase. It's not such that everything is just skyrocketing, certainly not. Don't get the impression that we have no problems. What we're doing is that we're following along very closely. We see that some of the sites are not going very well. In Greece, for example, two years ago, we had a launch. There we have not seen the progress that we had hoped, so that there we are reducing our ambition levels there. In the same way, we're going to be following all of these other sites that we have. All in all, things are going as we had hoped and planned.
If we look at the map of Europe, which is the light blue color here in Norway, Sweden, Spain, and France, we do very well. This is the dark blue. I hope that from next year, we can change the colors on some of the other countries as well, darken them up. That was what I had to say about classifieds. I would like to talk a little bit about the media houses. First of all, it was three weeks since the terrible terrorist attack that affected all of Norway. Our newspapers were right at the epicenter of this. VG was in these premises, and they had to move out because of the explosion. They brought their computers. They came down here, and then they moved further on because their offices were in danger.
They were at the Bristol Hotel then. While they established a temporary duty office, Aftenposten also chose to evacuate the premises. They had also their editorial staff was in Nydalen. In the midst of this terrible tragedy, I have to say how proud I am of the way our media houses handled this terrible situation. It is at times like that it is especially important that we can perform our duties and inform society about what takes place when there is an attack on Norway's democracy. I'm very, very proud of the way the media houses managed this, first and foremost, VG and Aftenposten. If we take a look at the individual media house, I'd like to talk about the pay products, payment products. We have, a lot of people are asking, how are things going with this?
After Murdoch, we find that people think that everybody's going to pay, but it's difficult to do this. What we see is that it takes time to get subscriber services, and I think that it will take some time before we really generate earnings on this. What's important is that we can experiment with this and see which models are prudent. Aftenbladet Pluss is the one that has done the most for the longest. They have a growing service. They have subscribers. Most of the services are for free, but if you want to read what's on Aftenbladet Pluss, then it costs a little bit. Usually, this is about NOK 30 a month. They're experimenting continuously. What should they put behind the curtain? What should be out in front of the curtain?
There in Aftenbladet, they have gained a lot of very interesting experience, and they see that this Plus services is appreciated. Aftenbladet, VG, and Aftenposten have all launched iPad products. It's still early. These are paid products, and it's going to take some time before the revenues really start to pick up, but I think we're gaining some interesting experience with this. In particular, Aftenbladet is experimenting which model is best. Is it per piece, per article, or is it a subscription? Thus far, they see that the subscription-based solutions are working best. If we look at the performance here, we see that there is margin, a 3% growth in the top line and a margin that is somewhat at about the same level as last year.
This quarter is the quarter, in particular for Media Norge Newspapers, is the most successful quarter, historically speaking. If we look at how the quarter has gone, they have turned in a good performance up to NOK 197 million here, EBITDA from NOK 182 million. We see that activities were very good in April and May, but they have slowed down a bit after that. What is important to note is that we have continuous development in several areas. We units are cooperating all across Media Norge. This has been planned. There are common IT solutions, so they cooperate on back office, on the printing activities. IT systems now have a common editorial system, ad system. This is on the in the pipeline, and we feel that this collaboration is developing well.
It's also very nice to see that this is demand-driven. Some people think this is from the top, but in fact, it's the media houses themselves that see that this collaboration is really something that's very positive for them. First, we started the paid iPad e-edition. It started with Aftenposten, it was introduced as a paid product in Q2, we'll see the others following suit as time passes. We have the margins here. They can vary a bit, but generally speaking, the margins are high and good. This is generally because we've had a good quarter, we've been good at cost control. Once that is accomplished, margins are generally good. Let us take a look at Sweden. The picture is a little more mixed there. In Sweden, we see a dip, a slight decline there.
We see that we are, it's tougher going for ads. The other income for the single copy circulation is going slower. The nice thing that I can report is that the online growth portfolio is developing well. If we take a look first at Svenska Dagbladet, these SEK 28 million, this is down from SEK 40 million, granted, but it's the next highest performance we've ever reported. We have to bear that in mind. There's been more competition developing, perhaps in particular from other news media, so that these different companies are fighting or both competing for the ads. We have a phenomenon for the quarter, and that is the convening letters for all of the annual general meetings. That was a very well-paid category, but now this has gone over to being electronic convening letters, and so we've lost that income.
The circulation income, circulation revenues have increased. Aftenbladet sees a number of the same fundamental development trends as VG does. We must say that it's also the comparison here is with a very good result in Q2 2010. Advertising revenues are down slightly. There's also been slow going in Sweden with the circulation. There have been some events that have contributed to this to make things better. For example, the Royal Princess, Crown Princess was married and so on. These events have helped and also some soccer games. We would like to see that the income for online had increased more. This can be because the results were good a year ago. We see that some of the advertising income, the advertising revenue, has gone now to Facebook and other media and classifieds like FINN.no.
Aftenbladet is very good. They're eager, they're doing a good job at developing the paid services, and they've also started the CRM system. They've introduced this so that they can keep track of their subscribers. They haven't had subscribers before, there's a lot of positive news to report here. It is a challenging situation, certainly. The online growth media we've talked about previously. We have this traffic fund that we use in Sweden to direct the traffic to the different sites. Some we've started ourselves and some we've bought. Marketplaces that were previously on paper have now moved to the internet, these have very promising development trends. Now the money is starting to get interesting, both for the performance, our revenues, and for the top line. The company Lendo.
Lendo is a financing company, and then Prisjakt is another one that has contributed strongly to this. Moving on then to Norway or back to Norway, rather. VG, we've seen, they have developed a very, very strong performance. It's on a line with last year's on a par, despite the fact that VG also has difficult market conditions to deal with. There the situation is such that they have managed to compensate the decline in advertising revenues through cost control, and they've also compensated for the price pressures. Combined with the fact that VG is moving in new directions, and they have more days now that they're publishing newspapers. For example, Ascension Day, the seventeenth of May, Norway's Constitution Day. We didn't publish newspapers before, but this year VG has published, and the results have been very good.
On vg.no, we see that there's the same trend as in Aftenbladet. There's strong growth, especially in the mobile platforms. The ad revenues for mobile services are good for both of these, and then we have to see how we can monetize, as it's called, this traffic. We're working very intensely with this. I will round off the media houses then with a brief look at the international activities in the group. In Estonia, we've had a good economic trend after a very deep dip so that we see there's a good trend there. In particular, it is the television station, but also our newspapers are making progress. In France, we're seeing tough competition, very tough competition. We're a very clear market leader, and we've increased the distribution of newspapers to a number of different media.
I think that this is going to be positive in competition with other competitors. We're also seeing that we're gaining by this. As I say, the competition is tough, but we're doing very well, and it looks like we're going to continue to do so. In Spain, naturally, things are hard, it's hard going, and there's a very harsh market environment there, and that has continued. We see this for 20 minutes and for the rest of the Spanish press. The positive thing there is that there's going to be an election in November, so perhaps there will be some clarification.
It's difficult to operate under these market conditions, and I think our staff there has done a very good job, and I think that we have every reason to be particularly satisfied with the online classifieds development in Spain. That was what I wanted to say about our business activities, media houses, and online classifieds. The floor is yours, Trond.
This is Trond Berger, the CFO. This is a second quarter that we experience as being a good one, and we also had a record quarter in 2010, I have to add, so that we're very well satisfied, in fact, in seeing that we still see growth in most of the parameters in this quarter as well. The underlying growth is 6% for total revenues year-over-year.
We also see advertising revenue picking up and not least for the online classifieds. There's been a lot of talk about the uncertainty that we're facing, the impact that that has. If we look at the financial crisis, this has certainly had an impact on our activities. What we saw throughout the financial crisis was that the underlying development trend was that our online classifieds increased even in the difficult times in 2009. We feel that we are well equipped in the situation we face now, and we have introduced a number of measures that we feel we're benefiting from now. We have an operating profit, EBITDA, of NOK 683 million, from NOK 652 million a year earlier. We've also increased our rollouts, organic growth in classifieds, which is also charged to the operating results.
If we look at the underlying picture for the income statement, we see that the costs are developing but are under good control. Mainly, we see the growth in online classifieds. We are managing to maintain good control of the established media houses, and we have depreciation and amortization of about the same level as last year. Our financial expenses are naturally affected by the dividends we've gotten from Polaris. Otherwise, there aren't any special comments there. We would comment that in 2010, we sold Sanejament de Vallès on real estate, and that brought us in almost NOK 400 million in gains from that sale. If we look at the bottom line in 2010, we had a better result than in 2011.
That was a one-off sale of real estate that was ascribable to. We have a tax percentage that is 33%, and this is what we've also mentioned earlier as well. If we look at the print advertising revenues once again, we see development terms that we feel are good at the same time as we feel that the market is perhaps a bit slower in Scandinavia. There's nothing in the past week's unrest that we have noted. Nobody has withdrawn campaigns and so on. Naturally, time will tell. There is some uncertainty attached to the situation that we face these days. If we look at our key financial figures, then we have strong key financial figures. We have a strong cash flow from operating activities, which is also has an effect on earning per shares. We don't have a lot of maintenance investments.
We have some expansion CapEx in the new activities, and we also have kept our maintenance investments under NOK 100 million, although we have replaced some editorial systems, and we have no plans for any significant investments in future. We have net interest-bearing debt that has increased slightly, but this is first and foremost related to some payments, not least dividends, more than NOK 300 million in the Q2. We've also had a settlement for Media Norge. These two have combined accounted for about NOK 700 million, so that our key figure here is about one when it comes to net interest-bearing debt compared with EBITDA. We have a strong balance sheet, as I've mentioned. We've gone through a refinancing process, and we feel that we have good repayment profile, debt maturity profile.
With the good cash flow we have, and we will continue to have good key figures in the future. As we've mentioned previously, we've said that we want to have a ratio with the net interest-bearing debt to EBITDA between one and two, and we will constantly monitor the situation, and we will be buying back some treasury shares in the market, some more treasury shares, as we view the situation at the moment. We have good liquid reserves in the system as well, liquidity reserves. If we look then at our cost control, we see that it's tight. It is an area that we focus on extensively throughout the group. We had a cost control program that we conducted in 2010, and we could see that it really filtered through to our figures.
We are now keeping a tight eye on this. We are watching costs in all of our activities. We still have efficiency improvement campaigns that we're running. We see that the number of employees we have not, in fact, increased even though times are better. We have managed to decrease some in established activities. We're very well satisfied with that. This increase comes mainly in the new areas for online classifieds and otherwise in online. Otherwise, we're not seeing really any big parameters where we're seeing changes from last year to this year. Raw material costs are up slightly. We're seeing prices are slightly higher in 2011. We are working with cost control continuously, as I said. We are going to continue to do that in 2012 and the years beyond.
If we look then at the expansion developments in Schibsted, this shows just the first half for the past three years. This is midyear. These are midyear figures in the underlying growth in EBITDA. If we keep these new investments in classifieds out of this, we see that we have very strong growth. H1 was colored in 2009 by the financial crisis, certainly, but we nonetheless increased this year from last year during the first six months, up to NOK 1,273 from NOK 1,153. The underlying trend is strong growth in our EBITDA even after making these adjustments. One thing that Rolv Erik didn't mention, but which was in Brazil, I would like to remind you that we now own 100% of Bom Negócio Brazil. This took place during the first half of this year.
The González family was here, as in Spain. They had about 24%, We now wholly own this activity in Brazil, InfoJobs is still 24% out. Back to you please, Rolv Erik.
It's difficult to forecast about the future, these days things are even more difficult than they have been previously. As a heading, I have to say that our media houses have strong, very sound market positions. They are working, continuing to work with product development. This is very important to us. We're working on cost control programs, focusing on costs, we also have to focus on innovation and new ways of doing things. Having said that, in times like these, we have to be extra alert when it comes to costs in all of our different activities.
There's no reason to believe that this is going to change or the trend that we see in circulation is going to change for any of the newspapers. As far as ads go, we have seen in Norway in particular that there was a good momentum until May, then things have slowed down a bit. There is no indication that things are going to be declining in August. Quite to the contrary, it's quite a flat level compared with last year, about on a par. Nor have we seen any effects from the financial turmoil. Naturally, if it turns out that this turmoil continues in financial markets, so this is going to have an impact on the ad situation, but it's just too early to say anything about this at the moment.
As regards online classifieds, we believe that they are going to continue strong growth. They are not as exposed to cyclical economic trends. We feel that these phase 2 activities, as we refer to them, are going to reach a positive result around the change of the year from 2011 to 2012. It's on the basis of the results that we're seeing now here and there that we have decided to expand our efforts and then to focus and invest in Brazil, not because we have more money than we thought we were going to, but because we see that developments have gone as planned or even better. That is then what we will conclude this presentation on the part of Trond and myself. We're prepared to take your questions. I don't know if there's microphones.
The second quarter result, you've talked about the unrest, the turmoil in the market, that it can have a negative impact on the ads market. Can you say a little bit more about how flexible you can be, where you will expect to see the greatest pressure if we see the turmoil and unrest continues? Could you just illuminate a little bit more, please? It's exciting to see that you're increasing your range of investment or scope of investment. Could you say a little bit more about that increase and whether it is related to all of the new areas of focus or if it's mainly in Brazil?
As regards to the first question that you posed about flexibility of the market in the face of market fluctuations, our business model is such for the media that we have fixed overheads, so that in the short term, it would have an impact on our results, and that would take place. It would be the same for all major media houses and newspapers. Now we're going into the period where we make our budgets, and we're going to be particularly alert when it comes to costs. We'll try to envisage scenarios where we see what is it that we'll do if this unrest continues and even spreads so that then we can come back to possible solutions.
With a view to the investments in online classifieds, we do not disclose what we invest in the individual countries. You have to understand that it's because of competition. What was, what was your question, really? It was whether you have any comment about Brazil or any of the other new establishments, if you could say something about that. Well, they're increasing somewhat compared with previously, but our investments are not increasing dramatically. I don't feel comfortable with going into that, how much we're investing. It's important, says Mr. Berger, that we're also increasing in other areas from apart from Brazil. It's not just Brazil. More questions? Yes. The interpreter apologizes. The sound is difficult here. The interpreter apologizes. It's not possible to get the question.
The answer, however, is that looking at 2012, we believe that 2012 won't be very different from 2011, given the plans that we have at the moment. There may be an adjustment. That's the best guidance that we can provide is the overall investment will be about the same. The iPad, subscriptions for VG and Aftenposten, can you say something about that? It's still early days for making any conclusions. Aftenposten has developed very well, and they are benefiting from the fact that they have subscribers, and they can offer iPad products to them, too. For VG, we've seen a positive development trend, given the prognosis that was. It was conservative, but, and I'm not going to go into the figures here.
In any case, in a spreadsheet at the moment, it would not have any tremendous impact. The most important thing is to establish new business models. More questions?
Yes. You have a deadline in September to sell some shares. This is a deadline posed by the competition authorities.
We are working with this case. We're trying to find a good solution there, certainly. I'll give you a call if I need some help. For the moment, we're going to keep this to ourselves. The interpreter apologizes. The sound for the questions is very difficult to hear.
In France, you said that you are increasing distribution to several cities. Can you say something about which cities this is and how this will impact the top line?
Yes, we are expanding in France. Again, the interpreter apologizes. The sound is not possible to interpret.
There are a number of new cities. The income is increasing. Is on about a par with the same period last year, and this is largely ascribable to this move because in the market, otherwise, it's generally flat. What is very gratifying is that we're seeing an increase in the tariffs, not just in the market shares, which is allowing us to earn these revenues. More questions? In online Aftenbladet. I don't know if we can say much about more than what we said about in the online classifieds. You've seen the pictures from the U.S. that Facebook and social media have taken about 1/4 of the market for branding on the internet, and we're seeing the same trends here at home. We're seeing that competition is keener for the brands.
What's gratifying for us is that our to see that our classifieds, Blocket and FINN.no, are actually winning market shares. This shows that that part of our business model is functioning very well. I'd also like to underline what I said that the mobile platforms for Aftenbladet and VG are very promising for traffic and also for classifieds and ad revenues, even though the figures are still relatively small at the moment. Sorry, the interpreter does not have sound for the question. There are several who have tried, and they experimented. Google has tried with different cases. Facebook has tried, but they have not really succeeded in taking the classifieds market.
We are very humble because we live in a world where technology changes very quickly, but the hypothesis has to be that we have to be even more aware of entirely new initiatives apart from competition from those two in particular. More questions? Any other questions? It doesn't appear to be the case, so I'd like to wish you a very good day, and thank you for following along on the webcast.