SPH to step up transformation via wide-ranging projects: chairman

Singapore

SINGAPORE Press Holdings (SPH) will step up transformation by embarking on wide-ranging projects to rejuvenate, reinvent and reposition itself in order to seek new growth areas, chairman Lee Boon Yang said, citing challenges led by disruption from social media and digital advertising.

The group will press on to strengthen its core media business with quality content, strategic partnerships and technological innovations, Dr Lee on Friday said at the group's annual general meeting (AGM) at the SPH News Centre, which was attended by 580 shareholders.

"For the core media business which remains a very important part of our business strategy, because we are first and foremost a media company, we will continue to re-engineer ourselves to deal with the digital competition."

To this end, he said the newsrooms have been re-organised to ensure they are more digital-ready. "Today our newsrooms operate on the basis of a 24-hour news cycle and digital is our first priority. So we will continue to reshape and strengthen our media platforms so that we will be able to meet the changing demands of our advertisers and audience."

Touching on the Bidadari investment, Dr Lee said the group expects to be able to launch the residential units in the later part of 2018. He pointed out that the group is branching into new and adjacent areas including healthcare and education, to "create new value" in the years ahead.

Dr Lee said this in response to a question from a shareholder on what the group's strategy is, to restore its recurring earnings to higher profitability.

Not surprisingly, several shareholders questioned the need for the group to hold on to its media business, with one describing it as "no longer relevant". This, as overall earnings has been weighed down by the media portfolio. The group's net profit in fiscal 2017 jumped 32 per cent to S$350.1 million on the back of the sale of an online classifieds business, but operating revenue shrank by 8.2 per cent to S$1 billion. The group in October accelerated a previously announced round of job cuts to deal with the challenges in its media business.

Pointing to the job cuts, one shareholder said if the core business is the media portfolio, then more resources should be pumped into it. To this, Dr Lee said even as the group rightsizes itself, it continues to invest in the media business by making it more digitally savvy. He cited Friday's announcement of the merger of the Chinese Media Group's (CMG) editorial resources from Lianhe Zaobao, Lianhe Wanbao and CMG Digital to form NewsHub, as an example of ramped-up efforts to raise productivity and put digital content first.

"We have also formed an integrated marketing division back in October 2016 in order to enable our marketing team to go out to advertisers so that they can offer to our advertisers a complete suite of service ... and in this manner I think we will be able to regain some of our lost grounds in the competition for advertising dollars," he elaborated.

When asked about the appointment of Ng Yat Chung as the group's new chief executive officer (CEO) during the 2½-hour- long meeting, non-executive and independent director Bahren Shaari said: "We have a thorough process of selecting candidates for the CEO and we have evaluated both internal and external candidates for the role and the situation that we have. And given the background and experience of Yat Chung, and what he has achieved in his career, we find him to be the most suitable candidate at this point, relative to other candidates that we evaluated."

Dr Lee noted that Mr Ng was the "most appropriate candidate", adding that he strongly supports the latter's appointment.

SPH thanked former CEO Alan Chan and ex-deputy CEO Patrick Daniel for their distinguished service. Mr Daniel remains a part-time consultant and will oversee some of the group's subsidiaries. In January this year, law firm Allen & Gledhill's partner Andrew Lim joined the board as a new director.

At the AGM, shareholders gave the green light for all the resolutions, one of which was for a final and special dividend of three and six Singapore cents per share, respectively. Including the interim dividend of six Singapore cents paid, SPH's total dividend for the financial year ended Aug 31, 2017 (FY2017) is 15 Singapore cents versus 18 Singapore cents in FY2016.

Shares of SPH, which is the parent company of The Business Times and The Straits Times, closed unchanged at S$2.76.