Cost cuts, a reduction in debt and improving digital performance helped Trinity Mirror record a 1% increase in pre-tax profits to £102.3m in 2014, despite a 4% fall in revenue to £636.3m.
The company plans to pay its first dividend since 2008 at 3p per share.
Trinity cut costs by £15m in 2014, £5m more than targeted, and says it plans to cut a further £10m over the course of 2015. Debt fell by £77.7m to £19.3m.
Digital revenues rose 47% over the course of the year to £32.4m, driven by a 87% year-on-year rise in unique monthly visitors to 73.2 million which helped more than double digital display revenues.
Despite digital growth, print declines forced operating profit down 2.3% to £105.5m.
The Trinity Mirror chief executive, Simon Fox, said: “We need to be in revenue growth. Last year our print revenue declined by £30m and digital only grew by £10m, so we’re not past that digital tipping point some of our peers are at.
“We absolutely do need to accelerate digital and that’s the objective, to make sure that digital growth offsets decline in print.”
Print revenue fell 6.3% to £521.6m, with Trinity saying falls in retail advertising, in particular supermarket spend, were partly to blame.
Fox said: “For the last four or five months our print spending by supermarkets has been down. We are highly dependent on retail, the Daily Mirror in particular.”
“There has been a certain amount of well documented turmoil in the supermarket world – changes of leadership, changes of strategy. They are still big and important advertisers to us, but they are spending less year on year. Clearly we hope that can reverse.”
Trinity restated it is setting aside £12m to handle civil complaints relating to phone hacking, having upped the figure from £4m in January. A hearing on damages for eight civil claims starts at the high court n Monday.
Fox said: “We are heading into a trial, the vast majority of the costs relate to legal costs and at one stage we had hoped we would be able to resolve matters without going to trial but that’s not what’s happening, so we’ve had to increase our provisions including for the costs of the next couple of weeks.”
Asked how confident he was that £12m would be sufficient to cover costs associated with the case, Fox said: “This number which is in our audited accounts represents the most accurate view we have of our exposure with all the information we have today ... Unfortunately it’s an uncertain world, but based on everything we know today we think that’s the right number.”