London – BBC Worldwide Ltd, the commercial arm and wholly owned subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), saw operating profits rise 17% to £117.7m (US$232.8 million) in the 12 months to 31 March 2008, on sales up 13% to US$1.8 billion. In 2005/06 41% of BBCW’s total revenues came from overseas, up to 46% in 2006/07, and up to 49% in 2007/08. The company plans to raise that proportion to around two-thirds by 2012. Asked for a breakdown by region of the overseas total, John Smith, chief executive, BBC Worldwide, said that two of BBCW’s most important priority markets for the future, China and India, reside within Asia. “India is a priority one country for us because it’s got a strong cultural affinity with our kind of programming and English language is highly prevalent there. China is a priority two country, the reason for that being the growth is very strong. So Asia has within it two of our most important countries. And in both cases, we’ve adopted an internal target at the end of five years to try and earn 1% in each case of the addressable media market in each of those two countries. I use the word addressable because in the case of China in particular … for example having a new BBC branded channel, means that we can’t pretend to secure any stake in the revenues that other people get from branded channels where we’re not allowed to.” Smith said that 2007 was a year of significant investment in new businesses, with over 34 million (US$67.2 million) charged to the P&L. “That’s spent on things like rolling out a suite of BBC branded themed TV channels in markets from Singapore to Poland. Also establishing additional production officers in Mumbai and New York, and further strengthening our content production network around the world.” In 2006/07 rest of the world sales grew 4.9%, with profit rising 26.9% to 8.5million UK pounds (US$16.8million). In 2007/08, rest of the world sales grew 6.9%, with profit rising 5.9% to UK pounds 9million, helped by the explosion of new video-on-demand customers.
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