NRJ 12 : Jean Paul Baudecroux presente l'année 2009 de NRJ

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am happy to welcome you to the presentation of our group's 2009 results. Before presenting the key figures, I want to discuss the data published by IREP France Pub last week on the evolution of net media spending in 2009. As I said last year, I have never seen such a decline. According to IREP, the media market decline was historic: advertising expenditures fell by nearly 1.5 billion euros, a drop of 12.5% after a 450 million euro decline in 2008. In radio, revenues fell 8.9%; in television, 11%, despite strong TNT growth. It is in this context that the group operated in 2009. Revenue stood at 333 million euros, a slight decline of 0.4%. Current operating profit (excluding exchange) reached 277 million euros, up 45.8%. This reflects very different trends across activities, which Jean-Pierre and Mariam will discuss in detail. Given this and the group's cash position, the Board will propose resuming dividend payments at the next general meeting, with a dividend of €0.20 per share. Let me now review our different activities, starting with radio audiences. The January-March 2010 audience survey is ongoing and will be released on April 15; I will focus on the 2009 figures. Looking at cumulative audience and total audience share of the group's four stations, we saw a recovery over the year: audience measured in the last two waves (September to December) improved compared to the first two waves (January to June). As a result, the group's audience share returned to last year's levels after hitting a low point. Detailed analysis shows the recovery came mainly from Rire et Chansons and Chérie FM, where programming work is paying off; for NRJ and Nostalgie, there is still work to do. Overall, the group's four stations are listened to daily by 11.8 million listeners, with leading formats on key commercial targets. For NRJ, France's leading active radio, we continue to work on the morning show with Nikos, which had two consecutive waves of growth. We are evolving the format, focusing on the daytime and music flow. Since December, the teams have remodeled NRJ's clocks, reduced news bulletins and presenter talk time to free up more space for music—a more varied playlist with faster rotation of hits, a more upbeat tempo. The local program that was split in two has been consolidated into a single slot from 4-8 PM to be stronger on drive time. On Fréquence 69, it is already a success, and we continue to evolve the program to attract all audiences, adding more rhythm to this infotainment format that alternates music, news, celebrities, and entertainment. I want to highlight an important point regarding our commercial strategy: if we focus on the key target of 25-49 year olds, the group's audience share is significantly higher for NRJ, Chérie FM, and Rire et Chansons, and it even increased for NRJ in the last two waves. This is crucial for our commercial strategy. Before reviewing Po TV audiences, I want to discuss a major trend I strongly believe in: the explosion of new ways to listen to radio, especially via the internet and mobile internet. We have developed many web radios offering specific formats like rap, rock, reggae. At the same time, the mobile internet exploded, with iPhone, iPod touch, and soon iPad revolutionizing the market. In 2009, we quickly developed apps that allow listening to radio and web radio via 3G, watching NRJ 12, consulting many other things, and buying music. This is a very strong trend; to date, more than 200,000 group applications have been downloaded in France. Also in 2009, we developed our partnership with Apple's download platform. I want to explain this so you understand how these developments project the music world into the digital realm—radio will play an important role. It is an exclusive partnership: iTunes provides us with thousands of titles to download for free each month—20,000 for NRJ—offering listeners total interactivity between radio and the impulse purchase chain, through the daily show '10' that broadcasts the day's iTunes top sellers. This show is gaining even more momentum. The principle: I listen, I like it, NRJ offers it to me, and I can listen again on my iPhone. This is 'hit online on demand,' which we started two years ago. iTunes is also the exclusive partner of NRJ concerts, where tickets are won on NRJ. It is also a partner of our new web radio NRJ, whose playlist consists of the most downloaded tracks in the US, Australia, Germany, UK, and France. Finally, we are working on technical solutions to allow the iPod nano to work in symbiosis with radio. This is a new market: the listener who hears FM radio on their iPod with a tuner can tag the music with a simple touch and later download it easily when they reconnect to iTunes. The next natural evolution of iPod—and later iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad—is radio, because Apple's other business is selling music, and they need the most powerful way to discover music: radio. With these developments, NRJ strengthens its position with record labels and artists. Radio has always been the best friend of the music market, and it hadn't fully played its role in digital music—it will naturally do so if we put radio back at the center of the system, as we are doing with iTunes. iPod and iPhone are not competitors of radio; quite the opposite. We are delighted to have music partners who fuel music sales. What sells a track is hearing it—you buy what you like and what you have liked. Our job is exactly that: making music discovered and rediscovered.