New accounts filed by Scholastic Ireland Holdings Ltd for the year ending May 31 last show the group’s pre-tax losses of €6m were a 31pc increase from the €4.62m recorded for the nine months up to May 2024, which means the comparison is not exactly like-for-like.
Revenues stood at €37.4m, up from the previously recorded €30.18m in 2024.
The Irish company’s hit series include Doc McStuffins and Octonauts, and it has won 22 Emmy Awards and secured two Oscar nominations, one for Give Up Yer Aul Sins.
The accounts show that the group recorded an underlying loss of €2.4m, and incurred exceptional costs of €3.6m in relation to redundancies and impairment, resulting in the pre-tax loss of €6m.
“This reflects changes in the industry which left the group with the unfortunate course of action of [having] to reduce its headcount,” the directors state.
“It is [our] intention to maintain the present activities of the group and to continue to focus on the strategy of investing in its own Intellectual Property (IP), with both produced and acquired content.”
Numbers employed by the group reduced from 202 to 194 during the year as staff costs increased from €15m to €16.7m.
In relation to the risks facing the company, the directors say sourcing skilled and experienced talent is a challenge facing the global animation industry. They also say that “rapidly changing technology and platforms are altering the broadcasting landscape and existing business models, and driving growth in direct-to-consumer and digital markets”.
Brown Bag Films made a €10.9m investment in film and television programmes, and spent €3.9m on acquired content. Current assets stand at €15.8m, down from €26m.
The company – which operates studios in Dublin, Toronto and Bali – was set up in 1994 by Cathal Gaffney and Darragh O’Connell. It was bought by Canadian based 9 Story Media Group in 2015.
9 Story Media was, in turn, purchased by the US based Scholastic for $185m in March 2024. Scholastic is a children’s publishing, education and media company.
The accounts show that in March 2025, the company sold all its interest in Brown Bag Films UK Ltd to Scholastic Ltd, realising a loss of €106,000.
At the same time the group acquired 100pc of the share capital of Scholastic Ireland Ltd, which publishes children’s books in the Republic. This was done by issuing equity instruments, with a fair value of €2.3m on the acquisition date.
During the year the company paid dividends of €1.68m, which compares to the €1.7m recorded in the last set of accounts.
The group recognised an impairment charge of €291,241 against its investment in Knights of Limited, the award-winning children’s publisher based in London, to which liquidators were appointed last November. Knights Of was founded in 2017 by two former Scholastic employees.