UK media and entertainment nears £100bn revenue mark despite uncertainty

The UK media and entertainment sector saw the revenues jump last year despite the backdrop of political and economical uncertainty in the country, according to Deloitte's Media Metrics 2017 report.

A more favourable exchange rate buoyed export content revenues, driving 11% growth to £96.3bn.

Dan Ison, lead partner for media and entertainment at Deloitte, said: "Against a backdrop of uncertainty, both politically and economically, over the last 12 months, it is reassuring to see that the UK media sector has performed robustly. The fact that this exciting and creative sector is close to £100 billion in size is nothing short of impressive."

Nevertheless, that buoyant headline figure masked very mixed cross-currents, as overall profitability more than halved, falling by 52% to £4.8bn, albeit almost entirely due to a sharp contraction of £5.0bn in the bottom line at Information Publishing and Events companies.

Television production and distribution on the other hand saw profits jump by 57% year-on-year to £2.6bn.

The TV sub-sector also generated the highest revenue (£40bn), average revenue per company (£2.1bn) and accounted for the largest share (41%) of all revenues for companies in the index for a second time.

Consumption of live content was the main source of revenue and profit for TV production, distribution and information publishing and events. Trade fairs, business conferences, live music gigs and theatre are popular revenue generators.

Advertising was cited as the second largest sub-sector in the index, generating £20bn in combined sales with information publishing and events which produced £18bn in revenues, trailing behind.

Meanwhile, social media was the fastest growing media sub-sector over the last three years at a compound annual growth rate of 83%, followed by the video gaming and TV production and production with a three year CAGR of 14%.

While, the ten largest media companies in the UK accounted for 70% of revenues (68bn),in contrast, to the bottom 50 companies which accounted only for 8% of total revenues.