Takeover saga pushes The Telegraph to a loss
Takeover saga pushes The Telegraph to a loss
Christopher WilliamsSat, August 8, 2026 at 8:00 AM UTC
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Digital subscriptions to The Telegraph grew by 8pc last year - Geoff Pugh for the Telegraph
The Telegraph slipped to a loss of nearly £4m last year despite its strong underlying profits, as the paralysis and costs of its three-year ownership battle took a toll.
Newly filed 2025 accounts for Telegraph Media Group Holdings show a loss before tax of £3.9m on a turnover of £273.2m.
Revenues fell marginally from £279.4m in 2024 under pressure from declining sales of print newspapers to subscribers and in shops, and of print advertising. Print accounted for 53pc of turnover.
Meanwhile, digital subscriptions and advertising revenue both grew by 8pc. At the end of the year there were 947,000 digital subscribers across all products, including a Puzzles app.
The ongoing rise of AI answers, which crimps traffic from Google search,hit turnover from Telegraph Travel and other lifestyle journalism by 20pc.
Yet the balanced performance in highly restrictive circumstances meant The Telegraph continued to deliver the strong underlying profits that helped draw a knockout bid from its new owner, the global publisher Axel Springer.
Excluding exceptional costs, at the Telegraph’s parent company Press Acquisitions Limited, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation were £50.5m, down from £61.2m in 2024. At this level, pre-tax profit increased from £7.6m to £13.8m.
Axel Springer and Mathias Döpfner, its chairman, have pledged to invest in the digital growth of The Telegraph. A new chief executive, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, will soon begin work with a remit to accelerate digital change that has been held back and deliver international and UK expansion.
Mathias Döpfner plans to accelerate The Telegraph’s digital strategy - Geoff Pugh for The Telegraph
Patrick Wehrmann, the new chief financial officer, said the business had been “resilient” and had significant opportunities ahead in events and the United States.
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The new era has arrived not a moment too soon. On a statutory pre-tax basis, Telegraph Media Group Holdings was driven into the red by a combination of cash handed to advisers and non-cash reductions in the value of intangible assets.
Three years of accounts for The Telegraph’s parent company show that the total paid to lawyers, accountants, bankers and various consultants has now exceeded £40m. Axel Springer completed its takeover at the end of June and further fees are expected for the current year.
The non-cash costs were prompted mostly by a restructuring which transferred the Telegraph operating business into a new shell company and severed risky links with its former owners, the Barclay family.
There was also an impairment of £4.2m on the valuation of the Chelsea Magazine Company, a niche lifestyle publisher acquired by Nick Hugh, the former chief executive, for £13m in 2023, shortly before The Telegraph was cast into limbo by the financial delinquency of the Barclays.
Their borrowing triggered a three-year crisis in June 2023, when Lloyds Banking Group seized The Telegraph via receivers. The lender was seeking to recover £1.2bn in overdue debt on which The Telegraph had been pledged as security.
Lloyds recovered the debt in full when the Barclay family made a complex deal intended to deliver ownership to the United Arab Emirates. Instead it prompted changes in the law to prevent foreign state ownership of UK news outlets and imposed massive costs and uncertainty, which were only ended by Axel Springer’s decisive £575m bid in March.
The new accounts suggest that the strains of the process were beginning to tell. They reveal that a “third party” – understood to be Axel Springer – stepped in with a £7m loan when cash appeared to be tight and normal corporate financing avenues were closed off by the ownership uncertainty.
The Telegraph continued to trade well and generate significant cash, but a £50m corporate debt with Lloyds – unlinked to the overdue Barclay family borrowing – could not be renewed when it matured last year and had to be paid off.
It meant that £35m of the cash generated in 2025 went towards repayments and tipped the business into negative cash flow.
The new accounts show The Telegraph began 2026 with £20m cash in the bank and £15m of its Lloyds loan still due for repayment. With the Axel Springer takeover agreed but not yet completed, the £7m loan appeared to avoid a cash crunch when the outstanding sum was due in May.
Source: “AOL Money”
