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 economic recession. However, prudent investment planning and a more positive economic development enabled us to exceed 2022 revenues, so we can consider last year a very successful year once again. We would like to thank all our employees and our users for this,” Pavel Zima, member of the Board of Directors of Seznam.cz, comments on the financial results.
In 2023, Seznam.cz continued to pursue its long-term vision of becoming a platform – content, advertising, knowledge, communication, social, e-commerce and cloud. In March 2023, the company opened its second in-house data centre Nagoya in Benátky nad Jizerou. Content from local governments was added to the homepage and the fact-checking setting the manipulative comments straight appeared in discussions. The number of navigations in the Mapy.cz application increased by 22% year-on-year, Sreality.cz introduced a new investment tool Price map of the development of realized prices of apartments in the Czech Republic, and the transition to a new and better vector model improved search results.
Years of experience with machine learning have led the Czech internet leader to establishing a new team developing its own generative language model. Today, it is already appearing for example in Vyhledávání. The deployment of its own LLM on other services of Seznam is expected to take place during this year and next year.
In June 2023, Hacsiko – the first female presenter with a synthetic voice created by using AI – started broadcasting on Expres FM radio. It was the first ever action of its kind on the audio market in the Czech Republic and Europe. Synthetic voices enable broadcasting of the regional content in the localities where the radio Expres FM started successful operation last year. These include West Bohemia, Zlín, Jihlava and Ústí nad Labem.
Artificial intelligence is also successfully used in the discussion ecosystem where it processes and classifies comments. The number of comments increased by 24% year-on-year. The number of active users also increased, namely by 43% compared to the previous year.
Preparing for a future without cookies
Ondřej Krišica, the current chairman of the Board of Directors of Seznam.cz, explains that the company has been preparing for the change in the advertising market for many months; the change will bring the end of support for third-party cookies in Google Chrome browser. “We are focusing on working with user identity so that even after the end of third-party cookies we can offer users the best possible experience within Seznam services. We have also launched a new program that significantly helps with the distribution of our solutions, such as Přihlášení přes Seznam, towards publishers, advertisers and e-shop platforms operating on the Czech online market. We also continued to develop our own ID graph,” specifies Ondřej Krišica.
In the area of working with user data, we launched the service Aktivita na Seznamu, which transparently shows users the history of their visits to the services of the domestic technology leader.
PR Manager & Spokesperson
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 …
Thanks to its continued market success and the attendant growth in capacity required for the processing of data, Seznam.cz has built its second proprietary data centre, called ‘Nagoya’, taking another step towards becoming an entity absolutely independent of external suppliers. The building takes up an area of approximately 1,200 square metres, with Seznam.cz, the number one …
