Zee Limited posted a 604.1% increase in standalone net profit to Rs 213.8 crore for the quarter ended June, 2021, as opposed to Rs 30.37 crore during the same quarter last year, as per the company’s Q1FY22 financial statements released on Friday.
The broadcaster’s revenue from operations rose 35.3% to Rs 1,775 crore in Q1FY22 from Rs 1,312 crore in FY21. Advertising revenue increased 120% to Rs 926.6 crore in Q1FY22, while subscription revenue rose 1.9% to Rs 813 crore. With lockdowns in most states, TV viewership again jumped during the quarter, though lower than Q1 of last year. However, due to covid, the network’s share dropped in some markets.
s per the company, domestic ad revenue also suffered an impact due to covid, however it was seemed to be in a recovery mode as the impact was not as much as the first quarter of last year. ZEEL posted 127% increase in year-on-year domestic ad growth but is yet to catch up to pre-covid levels as the margins are 22.7% lower than FY20.
Interestingly, subscription revenue managed to clock only 1.9% increase over Q1FY21 primarily due to an embargo on pricing change as NTO 2.0 litigation continued to hurt domestic television pay revenue growth. Further, the company highlighted that the 2% growth over Q1FY21 is driven primarily by digital business.
Moreover, the company increased its advertising and promotional cost by 60% to Rs 178.1 crore in Q1FY22. As per ZEEL, Increase in marketing cost on a Y-O-Y basis is on account of the release of Radhe and continued investments in ZEE5. Marketing costs in Q1FY21 was lower on account of much lower original content production.
As for ZEEL’s streaming platform, the company claims that ZEE% is gaining momentum as the platform registers 80.2 million global monthly active users (MAUs) and 7.1 million global daily active users (DAUs) in Jun’21. Further, Q1FY22 revenue of ZEE% stood at Rs 111.7 crore while the platform posted Rs 203 crore as EBITDA