Broadcast company GMA Network Inc. saw its net income in 2015 double to more than P2 billion from a year ago, its top executive said Thursday.
“Our net income after tax [last year] is more than 100 percent of 2014. It’s more than P2 billion,” GMA Network chairman and chief executive Felipe Gozon told reporters Wednesday night during the company’s thanksgiving party. The company posted a net income of P1.01 billion in 2014.
The company has yet to report the audited full-year net income in 2015. Nine-month profit jumped 80 percent in 2015 to P1.804 billion from a year ago, as revenues climbed 16 percent to P10.31 billion.
Gozon said he was optimistic the growth in revenues would be sustained this year. “For 2016, we expect it to be better. In fact, January is already better,” he said.
Gozon said GMA Network was no longer in talks with new investors, after the two failed negotiations with businessmen Ramon Ang of San Miguel Corp. and Manuel Pangilinan of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.
“There’s no hurry,” Gozon said, when asked about the timeline for a new investor.
The Gozon, Jimenez and Duavit families own a combined 79 percent of the network, which airs on Channel 7 on free TV.
Majority shareholders of the broadcaster earlier agreed to sell about 30 percent of the company to Ang, but the negotiation was scuttled after more than a year of talks. Talks with the PLDT group also did not push through over price and regulatory issues.
GMA Network said its online unit was also doing well. GMA News Online achieved more than one billion page views in 2015 and continued to expand its readership base in line with the increase in unique browsers, recent data from Effective Measure showed.
GMA News Online said it sustained its lead over ABS-CBNNews.com in terms of page views in December with 97.5 million page views ahead of the latter’s 69 million, and drove the portal’s web traffic.
Compared to the previous year, monthly average page views of GMA News Online hit 95 million in 2015, a 135-percent increase from the 40.4 million generated a year ago.
It said from 8.4 million in 2014, the website’s average unique browsers also increased to almost 13.3 million.