It's becoming the same old worrying story — Singapore's largest publisher, Singapore Press Holdings, is bleeding.

In its latest announcement of quarterly earnings, the media giant revealed that its third quarter net profit year-on-year nosedived 45.2 per cent to $28.9 million.

The company's flagship newspaper, The Straits Times, reported that this steep fall was chiefly because of a one-off impairment charge of $37.8 million from its tanking magazine businesses.

If you recall, we explained last year that an impairment charge "reflects that a company has invested too much resources into something that turned out, essentially, to be a bad decision — to put it crudely, a useless product."

But its other results are proving wanting too:

• Group recurring earnings dropped 43.6 per cent year-on-year to $34.3 million. Excluding the impairment charges, it was still a 19.2 per cent drop to $17.1 million, as compared to $53 million reported at the end of Q2.
• Group operating revenue also fell 10.8 per cent year-on-year to $260 million, although this figure was better than the $238 million it reported in Q2. ST noted in its report that "the performance of the media business continued to be hurt by the disruption of the media industry and a muted economic environment".
• Advertising revenue also declined by $29.2 million (an 18.7 per cent fall year-on-year), and circulation revenue by $4.8 million (a 10.6 per cent drop from a year ago).

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That said, things are looking up for SPH in the property sector, earning 2 per cent revenue growth year-on-year, on the back of higher rental income from its retail assets like its malls, like Paragon, Seletar mall and Clementi mall.

They also sold one of its subsidiaries, 701Search, which operates classified ads in Vietnam, Malaysia and Myanmar, and expect to turn a $150 million profit from that in the next quarter, the company said in reports.

Jiayou, SPH.

Top photo: ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images