The Czech internet leader, Seznam.cz, generated a pre-tax profit of CZK 1.961 billion in 2021. This is an increase by more than 22% year-on-year. Revenues rose by 13.3% to almost CZK 5.604 billion compared to the year 2020. The good results were driven by high traffic on the homepage, selected content services and the shopping guide and comparison site Zboží.cz. This year, Seznam.cz plans to invest significantly in the construction and expansion of its own data centres and key products and services.
“We were very cautious when planning the year 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Unlike our competitors, we still expected growth, but our estimates were in the lower units of percents. I have to admit that the result of revenues exceeding CZK 5.6 billion and the 22% increase in EBIT exceeded our expectations. Thanks for this reality go to all our employees, business partners and last but not least to our users,” comments Pavel Zima, co-CEO of Seznam.cz. Zima points not only to the significant growth compared to the plan, but also to the comparison with the results of previous years, when Seznam.cz grew by units of percent.
The company achieved above-average business results thanks to the experience gained in the first year of the covid. “We adjusted our business strategy and pricing to match the needs that our clients were solving during the lockdowns. Many of them were more mindful of the money they were investing in marketing and only focused on media types that measurably worked. Thus, thanks to hundreds of our marketers who provide individual care to advertisers, Seznam’s online advertising accelerated its growth and for majority of our partners it was the main channel for sustainable business development even during the coronavirus pandemic,” explains Tomáš Kapalín, co-CEO of Seznam.cz.
According to him, clients successfully used online advertising to build awareness of their brands using banner formats, video or native advertising from the world-renowned Seznam Brand Studio. The company was also successful in developing business relationships with partner publishing houses, which present their content in the Seznam.cz Newsfeed service on the homepage of the domestic Internet leader. “Our homepage is the first choice for Czech users when they are looking for up-to-date information. Thanks to this, we were able to deliver 23% more visits to our partners last year than in the previous year, and hand in hand with this we also dramatically increased the revenues from their news articles and videos,” Kapalín adds.
The past year was marked by several major product innovations at Seznam. These include enhancements to the service Email Profi, a service that allows businesses and special interest groups to operate an unlimited number of free email accounts on their own domain. Traffic navigation in the Mapy.cz application underwent extensive innovation, Sport.cz and Sauto.cz were redesigned, and the Stream video portal was rebranded, along with the launch of the new Smart TV and HbbTV application. The e-commerce activities were separated into a separate division, and the economic newsroom was created within the editorial office of Seznam Zprávy, which became the most visited economic portal on the Czech Internet in 2021. Seznam.cz has also made great progress in the area of user content across services.
Seznam’s audio also saw significant growth, up 160% year-on-year. Its digital listenership exceeded 300,000 plays per week on the web and in applications.
“This year, we want to focus primarily on making Seznam a platform that meets needs of all our users. Our goal is to become the content, advertising, knowledge, communication, social, e-commerce and even cloud platform. This is closely related to the user’s identity and their login to our services. In this respect, we are also active from a business perspective, where we are creating the so-called Czech Ad ID for the market together with our partners – a tool that will ensure the sustainability of targeted advertising even after the end of third-party cookies,” says Pavel Zima, specifying the nearest plans and investments of Seznam.
Seznam.cz is planning large investments into its own hardware and the construction of data centres, among other things. In addition to the creation of the new Nagoja data centre in Benátky nad Jizerou, which is scheduled to be launched in 2023, Kokura, which Seznam.cz has been using since 2015, will also be expanded.
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The company Seznam.cz, Czech internet leader, has slightly increased its revenues in 2023 – they grew by 0.18% compared to 2022 to CZK 5.939 billion. Profit before tax also grew slightly, in particular by 6.06% to CZK 1.362 billion. “We entered the year 2023 in anticipation of the cooling domestic online market and the ongoing …
The Czech internet leader has opened its third data centre. The new building was added to the existing data centre in Horní Počernice, which was commissioned in 2015. The implementation took exactly one year and was carried out in cooperation with Metrostav and the general contractor, Altron.
Compared to 2021, revenues of the company Seznam.cz increased by 5.8% to almost CZK 5.93 billion. On contrary, the Czech internet leader’s pre-tax profits amounted to CZK 1.284 billion, i.e. 34.5% drop year-on-year. The decrease in profits was due not only to rising costs related to the current economic situation, but also to significant personnel …
