DB Corp’s third-quarter revenues have declined, but it reported strong operational performance driven by high gross margins and lower expenses. Girish Agarwal, Promoter and Director at DB Corp spoke with CNBC-TV8 about their third-quarter earnings fineprint.

On revenues, Agarwal said, “Q3 we were able to achieve 87 percent of last year Q3 one of the big achievement considering the pandemic and environment around. Good thing is that our EBITDA grew by almost 16 percent over last year and based on the strong cost-cutting that we were able to implement in the company without comprising on the quality. In October and November month which was the season month, we were almost at 95 percent of our last year's revenue. We are confident that going forward things are only going to improve.”

On the circulation revenue, he said, “From pre-COVID numbers, we are now at 87 percent almost at 90 I would say. But if I take a benchmark of December last year then we are at around 85 percent, with the railways opening up and the state transport system opening up we should be able to increase this 10 percent gap in the next couple of months.”

On price hike, Agarwal said, “Price hike is not possible currently, but we have stopped all the discounts so we are coming back to the normal pre-COVID operating rates.

On cost savings, he said, “Out of the total cost of Rs 200 which we have saved last year, I think around 80-90 crore will continue the saving for next year also. As far as the newsprint is concerned we are seeing some kind of increasing happening because of the waste paper, but we are hoping that no impact should come on Q4.”

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(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)

First Published:Feb 9, 2021 12:55 PM IST