Thursday June 25th 2015: SGAE hold its Annual General Assembly, where the accounts for the financial years of 2013, the accounts for the financial years of 2014 as well as the Management Report and Corporate Social Responsibility for the year 2014 where all approved by its members. In his speech to the General Assembly, Mr. José Luis Acosta, president of the SGAE, highlighted all the difficulties that the organization had to face last year; the controversial reform of the Spanish intellectual property law, the negative impact of the high taxes on cultural products and services and the crisis of the Spanish economy still remains, among other negative impact as the Spanish Private Copy compensation and the Spanish leadership in illegal internet downloads in the EU. Despite of this, SGAE has had a good performance during 2014.
The income statement shows that SGAE collected 260.934 million euros in 2014 (including neighboring rights); representing a slight increase from the social income collected during the previous year (259.766 million euros in 2013). This slight growth of our social income, despite the difficulties that the Spanish culture industry has been through this year, has been possible due to the beginning of the recovery of the advertising investment in mass media, the improve of the online and the international social revenues, the decrease of the Public Administration arrears and more efficient management of the territorial network.
In 2014, over 700,000 new musical, audiovisual and dramatic works were registered in SGAE, reaching 10.1 million registered works, exceeding 80 million of works represented. New members have joined the company already surpassing 115,000 members. SGAE currently manages more than 70% of the intellectual property rights generated in Spain and has in force more than 280 representation agreements worldwide. 238,000 members (34,000 direct members) were benefited from the distribution of rights in 2014.
