The 2019 financial year has proved a success for Hubert Burda Media. With consolidated external turnover of €2.792 billion, the company has increased its turnover slightly – by 4.8% – compared with the previous year (€2.664 billion). In 2019, Burda’s portfolio contained around 600 products in Germany and 16 other countries. The group’s key sources of revenue are trading and sales turnover, commission models, advertising and B2B services.
Burda encourages entrepreneurial spirit and expects employees to take responsibility. Our decentralised structures and various business models create the framework for growth. We approach the unknown with curiosity, face challenges with flexibility and seize opportunities with courage. At the end of the financial year, the consolidation group included a total of 256 companies, 147 in Germany and 109 in other countries. At the end of 2019, the group employed 12,292 people.
In 2019, the Digital Brands division achieved turnover of €1.440 billion, around 52% of total turnover.
New Work SE continued to grow in all areas, and its excellently positioned brands benefited once again from the megatrend of paradigm shifts in the world of work. The operative result increased by 14% to €85.6 million. Xing, the professional network for the modern working world, has more than 17 million members in the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). Cyberport and Computeruniverse, both e-commerce companies, also made a name for themselves in the highly competitive e-commerce environment. Jameda, Germany’s biggest doctor/patient portal, significantly increased its sales revenue in 2019. Every month, Jameda helps 6 million patients to find the right doctor via digital means.
While 2019 proved a challenging year for the entire travel industry, HolidayCheck Group AG increased its turnover by 3.5% with an operative result of €7 million. Once again, the HolidayCheck Group’s activities focused on continuously developing existing products and platforms in the core package holiday areas and on harnessing new, adjacent business fields, such as brokering cruises and organising its own package holidays.
Digital publisher BurdaForward further strengthened its platform business in 2019. By October 2019, 170 media brands and publishers had joined the Conunity publisher network, and their content is displayed on BurdaForward’s platforms on equal terms with its own content.
The National Media Brands division, Burda’s German publishing section, includes the publishing groups BurdaNews, BurdaStyle, BurdaLife, BurdaHome and Blue Ocean Entertainment, which publishes children’s magazines. In 2019 they published a total of 150 regular magazine titles, reaching 46.14 million people per year – this equates to 65.4% of the German population aged 14 and over.
The division employs a range of sustainable business models in all five of these publishing groups and generated turnover of €756 million last year (16.2% more than the year before). This growth is primarily due to the National Media Brands division assuming operational responsibility for BurdaDirect, a provider of cross-media sales, marketing and services relating to magazine subscriptions.
By acquiring the Netdoktor.de online health portal and via redesigned health magazine My Life, Burda reinforced its aspiration to be Germany’s leading provider of journalistic health information. The division secured a major contract with ADAC, which as of 2020 has totally repositioned its member magazine “ADAC Motorwelt”.
The national media brands also continued to expand their digital business activities in 2019. The total reach of all digital offerings increased by 24% to 1.95 billion cumulated visits; in 2019, the division recorded a 20.3% rise in unique users to 26.6 million.
Burda’s international activities, consolidated in its International Media Brands division, focus on the UK, continental Europe and Asia. The business unit is active in 17 countries. In addition to its online activities, which were further enhanced in all markets in 2019, Burda and its partners published 293 titles abroad. With 281 titles, Europe is by far the most important region.
In 2019, the majority of the €444 million turnover once again came from Immediate Media, a group focused on magazines and digital consumer business in the UK. Immediate Media completed its acquisition of BBC Good Food in autumn 2018 and acquired the Upper Street Events and River Street Events agencies in 2019, making it the UK’s leading food publisher and one of its leading event agencies.
The 2018 reorganisation of the international publishing business with four independent subsections – Immediate Media, Publishing Europe, Burda Luxury and BurdaEducation – was further developed in 2019 to include a new subsection called Burda Create!
BurdaPrincipal Investments (BPI), Burda’s international investment business, provides long-term growth capital for fast-growing technology and media companies and made further investments in Germany, the UK and Asia in 2019. For the third time, BPI took part in a round of financing for Zilingo, Southeast Asia’s leading fashion platform. It also invested in Hmlet, an international provider of flexible living solutions for millennials. Vinted, another portfolio company, achieved a total value of over one billion euros based on its last round of financing, in which Burda also participated.
The BurdaDruck Group specialises in high-quality magazines, catalogues and printed advertising produced via high-volume gravure printing and all services required to do this. With sites in Offenburg (two plants), Nuremberg and Vieux-Thann (France), it is one of Europe’s largest printing companies. Its external turnover in 2019 was €139 million. Despite a continuing decline in the market as a whole, and contrary to expectations, this allowed it to significantly increase its turnover.
| 2018 | 2019 | Change | |||
| € million | in % | € million | in % | ACTUAL (in %) | |
| Digital Brands | 1,471.2 | 55.2 | 1,440.2 | 51.6 | -2.1 |
| National Media Brands | 650.9 | 24.4 | 756.2 | 27.1 | 16.2 |
| International Media Brands | 413.0 | 15.5 | 444.3 | 15.9 | 7.6 |
| 116.5 | 4.4 | 139.3 | 5.0 | 19.6 | |
| Other | 12.6 | 0.5 | 12.1 | 0.4 | -4.1 |
| Sales revenue | 2,664.2 | 100.0 | 2,792.1 | 100.0 | 4.8 |
Contact:
presse@burda.com
