Vienna - Rising revenues are rather rare among the major Austrian media companies: The subscription platform Sky seems to have made quite decent gains in Austria in 2014, as did the private station group ProSiebenSat.1Puls4, and possibly also Red Bull Media House, if it could continue its development.
The ORF, by far the largest media group in the country, is obviously lacking the 30 million euros - until 2013 - with which the Republic has compensated it for part of the broadcasting fee exemptions over the past years. It also downsized itself a little: part of the decline in sales was due to a "reclassification" to other operating income, it said when asked.
In 2013, ORF's billion in revenue was as big as the three biggest publishing houses combined - i.e. Mediaprint, Styria and Moser Holding. In 2014, it is still far larger than the country's two publishing giants combined.
DER STANDARD again collected key figures for the overview - sales, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization - and the number of employees. From different sources and not always completely comparable, especially with regard to employee figures: Companies' own data, company register and, where both did not help or were not up-to-date enough: estimates.
The overview took a bit longer than usual - large media companies, especially Styria, are keeping their figures under wraps even longer than before this year - which may also be a reflection of economic developments. We will add the values as they become available, for now we have estimated them. Declining sales at Styria have already been confirmed by the still relatively new CEO Markus Mair himself in interviews.
Mediaprint's revenues developed stably in the most recently available fiscal year 2013/14, and earnings improved significantly in that year. Sales at Moser Holding ("Tiroler Tageszeitung") were also stable, and earnings before taxes, depreciation and amortization, and probably above all interest, improved again somewhat.
ProSiebenSat.1Puls4 usually presents the most impressive result from ordinary activities in this overview: With - estimated - revenues of around 130 million, after a good 125 in the previous year, the marketing and TV group achieves results well above EUR 20 million.
Negative results can be found, for example, at Niederösterreichisches Pressehaus and the STANDARD Group, both of which restructured in 2014, or at ATV.
The fundamentally new technical implementation also took a bit longer than usual. Click on the media houses to open the detailed data, and click on them again to close the fields.
An overview of companies from the media infrastructure, outdoor advertising and media marketing sectors is still in the works - this will follow in the next few days.