Mail.ru ups revenues 33% to 6.6 bln rubles in Q3
MOSCOW. Oct 25 (Interfax) - Mail.ru Group made 6.59 billion rubles in sales revenues in the third quarter of this year, a 32.9% year-on-year increase, the company reported.
Analysts at six investment companies and banks surveyed by Interfax had expected company sales revenues of 6.4 billion rubles.
Revenue from banner ads was up 12.5% at 1.2 billion rubles, from context ads 61.1% at 1 billion rubles, from additional services 39% at 2 billion rubles, and from multiplayer online games 32.5% at 1.5 billion rubles.
Other revenue, which includes primarily revenue from value added services not included in the main segments, grew 25.6% to 751 million rubles.
The company's net cash position was 26 billion rubles on September 30. Analysts expect Mail.ru to share its revenues with shareholders through special dividends as it has done repeatedly in the past.
Mail.ru paid special dividends of $4.30 per share, totalling $899 million, in March. Prior to this the company sold shares in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga for about $620 million. In July-August, Mail.ru sold its remaining 14.2 million shares in Facebook for $525 million. The company also earned $73.2 million in the October SPO by Qiwi, in which Mail.ru sold 2.4 million shares, reducing its stake in the instant payments company to 10.4%.
Mail.ru Group reaffirms its 2013 sales revenue growth forecast at 27%-29%. The earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margin is still anticipated at 53%-54%.
"Looking forward, the structural drivers of our business remain unchanged and hence we look into Q4 2013 with confidence," Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin said. "As in H1 contextual advertising continues to be strong supported by a continued focus on the Target product, and our solid market share in search. In addition in Q3 contextual advertising also benefited from our monetization agreement with Yandex. Going forward we will continue to replace display inventory with Target wherever possible as this is a more efficient use of the advertising inventory. As such, we would expect our contextual revenues to continue to grow faster than display revenues."
According to Liveinternet, Mail.ru's search share in September was 8.4%. Mail.ru's monthly audience in Russia reached 33.7 million users in September 2013, according to TNS Russia.
Mail.ru Group wholly owns the Mail.ru internet resource, the ICQ instant messaging service and 21.35% payment service Qiwi. The company also has full control of HeadHunter.ru and the social networking site Odnoklassniki as well as 39.99% another social networking site, VKontakte.
The majority shareholder of the Mail.ru Group is Alisher Usmanov, whose structures own a 17.9% economic interest and 58.1% of votes. South African media holding Naspers has a 29% economic interest through MIH Mail Investment Company B.V. and 35% of votes. Chinese internet company Tencent owns a 7.8% economic interest and 1% of votes. Grishin owns 1.85%. The company has a free float of 43.5% (5.9% of votes).