Granada grinning about performance
Pre-tax profits up 13% to $1.2 bil
Granada's media interests -- the group also owns hotel, restaurant and rental businesses -- performed exceptionally well, with pre-tax profits of $423.3 mil-lion, a jump of 36%.
Granada pointed to cost savings from its ITV network franchises -- most importantly, the integration of Yorkshire Tyne Tees, which Granada bought last year -- as contributing substantially to its growth.
Granada (with Carlton Communications, one of the two big ITV companies) added that its four ITV franchises saw a 12% increase in ad sales for the second half of the year, well above ITV's 8% average.
On the TV production side, Granada had sales of $581 million. With the addition of Yorkshire, Granada produced more than 5,000 hours of programming in the year.
Granada -- maker of "Coronation Street," the U.K.'s most popular TV show -- said it had now become "Europe's largest and most successful commercial program production company."
Granada and Carlton co-own ONdigital, the digital terrestrial rival to satcaster BSkyB's Sky Digital TV platform. While Sky has declared that it has already signed more 100,00 digital subscribers, ONdigital has yet to give any hard figures.
Granada did say, however, that ONdigital had had 250,000 potential customer inquiries and that "boxes were being sold as quickly as they reached the shops." Brisk sales are, at least in part, due to ONdigital's difficulty in supplying enough boxes to retailers.
