Logo of the Seznam.cz company on the building of the data center in Venátky nad Jizerou, March 9, 2023.
Prague – The domestic internet leader Seznam.cz's profit fell last year by taxation by 34.5 percent to 1.28 billion crowns. Sales, on the other hand, rose by 5.8 percent to 5.93 billion. The decrease in profit is due to increasing costs related to the current economic situation, but also significant personnel investments, which were almost eight percent higher compared to the previous year, and the change in the company's property structure due to the spin-off of Seznam Zpráv. Seznam announced this in a press release today.
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“Taking into account the market situation, I think that we managed last year better than expected. Although our profits decreased due to the unfavorable economic situation and increasing costs, we were able to grow in sales. This year, however, we expect rather a stagnation of our sales, and precisely with regard to the effects of the energy crisis or the ongoing war conflict in Ukraine,” said board member Pavel Zima.
Seznam.cz home page< /i>has expanded the content formats in its Newsfeed service, where in addition to articles and videos, photo galleries, cartoons, podcasts and, now, also user content in the form of discussion posts and texts from Seznam Médium are displayed. New functions were also added to the Seznam.cz application, where a podcast and e-mail module was deployed.
Last year, Seznam launched the Seznam Medium blogging platform and a new version of the Volnámísta.cz service, which, with the help of advanced neural models and machine learning, aggregates the majority of available advertisements from direct employers in one place. Email.cz is still number one in the Czech Republic and is trying to strengthen this position by developing business solutions in the form of Email Profi. Mapy.cz increased the number of navigations by 24 percent, and significantly strengthened user engagement in the form of a large increase in user reviews.
In the area of online trading, Seznam.cz last year recorded a 99 percent increase in client investment in product advertising in Search. The better relevance of advertisements on Zboží.cz increased the number of product advertisement impressions, thereby increasing the number of visits to client websites.
While the market for content websites started to decline noticeably last year, Seznam.cz maintained its year-on-year visitor numbers. The social system built around discussions also helped. Users contributed a record 18 million posts and 200 million ratings to it in one year.
Seznam Zpráv audio listening increased by 152 percent. The number of podcast playbacks on the Seznam Zpráv website increased by 36 percent year-on-year, the number of downloads in third-party applications increased by 255 percent, and the number of playbacks on Podcasty.cz by 944 percent. Television Seznam achieved a viewership share of 1.9 percent in December. The number of video creators who publish on Stream.cz has increased to more than 300, and the monthly number of published videos has exceeded 2,000. In terms of content, Stream.cz has focused more on the offer of films and documentaries.
It has been active since last year Seznam.cz also in Slovakia, where 22 people are currently working. The construction of a second own data center called Nagoya, which was opened in March this year, also continued.
Seznam is owned by its founder Ivo Lukačovič.
