Auditel Consultant:
James Bury

ITV return to profitability through . . . . cost cutting

03 Mar 2010 | Filed under: Cost reduction

I learned through the BBC this morning that ITV have announced a return to profitability through a combination of cost cutting and growing market share. They have managed to cut costs by around 9%, which has given them a pre-tax profit of £25m.

One of my great loves is business strategy – working out what a company needs to be better at, and what it needs to do, to be more successful. It’s a fascinating field and one that can deliver huge improvements to the fortunes of any organisation. ITV has successfully made itself more profitable, which has given lenders more confidence to finance it, which has lowered their cost of capital, and allowed them to start the costly move out of their historic and massively regulated traditional market into areas where they can use their creativity to compete commercially. As well as being an excessively long sentence, that’s quite a trick in difficult times, so hats off to John Cresswell and his team for achieving it.

While I would love to be managing some of ITV’s costs for them, they have yet to sign me up so there is still the chance for other organisations to get in first. If you could do with additional time and funds to grow your business, it may be worth an informal chat to discuss opportunities. Meanwhile, ITV’s strong performance shows that anything is possible even in the toughest markets.