Alma Media

Alma Media had a good year in 2025, even if it was not quite a great one. Revenue reached €327.1 million, up 4.6% on 2024, and the company’s preferred measure of profitability, adjusted operating profit, grew by 6.8% to €82.1 million, representing 25.1% of revenue. Earnings per share rose by 5.9% to €0.67, and the Board has proposed a dividend of €0.48 per share, up from €0.46 the previous year. The balance sheet strengthened: the company’s debt relative to earnings fell to its lowest level in years, and the equity ratio improved to 52.6% from 48.6%. On most measures, Alma Media is in better financial health than it has been in at least half a decade.

The company is, by its own description, undergoing a strategic transformation from a traditional media group into a provider of digital platforms and services. Journalism is one piece of a larger puzzle that also includes job boards across Central Europe and the Baltic states, housing and car marketplaces in Finland and Sweden, and a growing portfolio of data and comparison services for businesses. News media, which Alma calls “Alma News Media”, generated about one-third of group revenue in 2025, but that share has been shrinking for years as the marketplace businesses grow. The journalism operations remain profitable, increasingly digital, and broadly stable in revenue terms, but they are no longer the company’s strategic centre of gravity.

Alma Media: key financial and audience indicators 2023–2025

Source: Alma Media FY2025 Financial Statements Bulletin, 5 February 2026. *Estimated from Q3 2025 interim report figure of 223,000 and year-end figure of “nearly 230,000.”

Alma Media is a Finnish company listed on Nasdaq Helsinki, headquartered in Helsinki. It employs around 1,600 people on average (excluding telemarketers). The group’s journalism operations are consolidated into a single reporting segment, Alma News Media, which covers all of the company’s editorial brands in Finland. Outside journalism, the group runs two other main businesses: Alma Career, a network of job boards across Finland, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, and the Baltic states; and Alma Marketplaces, which operates Finland’s leading housing and automotive online platforms alongside a growing set of data and comparison services.

The journalism portfolio is entirely Finnish-language and Finland-focused. Its two flagship brands are Iltalehti and Kauppalehti. Iltalehti is Finland’s largest digital news outlet by audience, a tabloid-style national title that covers general news, politics, entertainment, sport, and lifestyle. Kauppalehti, founded in 1898, is the country’s leading financial and business newspaper, serving investors, executives, and professionals. Other titles in the segment include Talouselämä (business analysis), Tekniikka & Talous (technology and engineering news), and Arvopaperi (investment and markets). The segment also includes Suoramarkkinointi Mega, a direct marketing services business.

Three titles that had been part of the segment were closed at the end of 2024: Kauppalehti Optio and Kauppalehti Fakta (two business magazine supplements) and Mediuutiset (a health sector trade publication). The food content site Kotikokki Net was sold in October 2024. The search engine optimisation and digital marketing business Netello was divested in late 2025. Each of these exits was framed as a pruning of weaker or non-core assets to sharpen focus on the main digital journalism brands. The editorial workforce in the News Media segment fell by around 7% year-on-year by end-2025.

Alma Media: journalism asset map

Source: Alma Media FY2025 Financial Statements Bulletin; company interim reports 2024–2025.

Signals

The journalism unit improved its profitability in 2025 mostly by cutting costs

The Alma News Media segment’s adjusted operating profit grew by 11.1% in 2025 to €17.2 million, and its profit margin improved from 14.4% to 16.2% of revenue. In the fourth quarter, the margin reached a record 18.9%. These are the healthiest profitability figures the journalism unit has posted in several years.

The improvement was achieved less through revenue growth than through cost reduction. The segment’s revenue was essentially flat year-on-year at €106.3 million, slightly down from €107.7 million in 2024, with the decline largely explained by the closure of the three discontinued titles and the Netello divestment. Adjusted operating expenses fell by 3.4%, driven by lower printing and distribution costs (as print volumes decline, so do the costs tied to them) and workforce reductions. Print advertising, which has been declining for years across the industry, fell by 22.7% in the full year, in line with the broader structural trend.

The ability to grow profit margins while revenue is broadly flat is a notable operational achievement. But it rests on a cost-reduction logic that has a limited runway: at some point, continued cuts begin to affect the quality and depth of journalism rather than simply removing overhead.

Digital subscriptions are growing, but the segment is still heavily reliant on advertising

The total number of digital subscriptions across the Alma News Media segment reached approximately 230,000 by end-2025, up 10.9% from the previous year. Digital content revenue grew by 9.5% for the full year. Kauppalehti was a notable contributor: the introduction of an AI-powered dynamic paywall in the summer of 2025, that adjusts which content requires a subscription based on reader behaviour and article demand, accelerated digital subscription growth at the title. The “Ask Kauppalehti” service, a conversational AI interface for financial content, was also launched in Q4 to support the push toward recurring subscriber revenue.

The digital content ambition is real, but advertising still dominates the revenue mix of the segment. Advertising accounted for €46.3 million of the segment’s €106.3 million in revenue (around 44%) while content (subscriptions and single-copy sales) accounted for €50.8 million. For now, the two streams are roughly balanced. But the direction of travel matters: digital advertising in the segment grew by 2.9% in 2025, while print advertising fell by 22.7%. The digital advertising share of total advertising reached 84.5% in 2025, up from 80.6% in 2024, a significant shift in a single year.

Iltalehti is Finland’s largest digital news outlet and that audience is being commercialised more aggressively

Iltalehti holds a structural advantage that its competitors struggle to match: it is the most-visited digital news site in Finland. That reach makes it Finland’s most valuable single editorial asset for advertising purposes, and Alma has been investing to deepen its monetisation. In October 2025, Iltalehti introduced a new user consent and cookie model specifically designed to make targeted advertising more effective in a privacy-regulated environment, a technically and commercially important move as digital advertising increasingly depends on consent-based first-party data rather than third-party tracking. The site’s daily news podcast and AI chat features were expanded during 2025, and the Iltalehti Plus paid subscription service continued to grow.

Iltalehti is essentially the “reach” asset of the News Media segment. It draws the audience that funds the advertising revenue. Kauppalehti is the “depth” asset. It serves a higher-income, more professionally engaged readership that pays directly for content. The segment’s strategy increasingly rests on operating both models simultaneously and finding cross-promotional opportunities between them.

Kauppalehti is being repositioned as a premium investor and business media platform

The most significant editorial transformation underway inside Alma News Media is at Kauppalehti. The title has been systematically repositioned away from a traditional print-first business newspaper and toward a digital subscription platform for investors and business professionals. The November 2025 redesign of the stock market service, integrating journalism and market data, simplifying access to investment tools like share comparison and key company figures, is part of a broader effort to make the subscription feel essential rather than optional to its core audience.

The timing is not accidental. The Helsinki Stock Exchange had a strong 2025 by Finnish standards, with several new IPOs and increased retail investor interest. Kauppalehti’s editorial team capitalised on this with expanded investment coverage and the daily Talousaamu broadcast (a morning finance show whose viewership grew during the year). Growing retail investor interest in Finland is one of the more favourable demand-side tailwinds for a subscription-based financial title.

The partnership with Inderes, a Finnish equity research and investor communications firm, deepened in January 2025, giving Kauppalehti subscribers access to Inderes’ analysis reports. This kind of editorial-commercial integration, where third-party research content enhances the subscription value proposition, is a model that financial news titles in larger markets have used for years. Alma is applying it systematically to Kauppalehti.

The company shrank its journalism portfolio to sharpen it, but the closures came at a human and editorial cost

The closure of Kauppalehti Optio, Kauppalehti Fakta, and Mediuutiset at the end of 2024, along with the earlier sale of regional newspapers (Aamulehti, Satakunnan Kansa, and others, divested in a previous strategic cycle), means that Alma Media’s journalism footprint today is considerably smaller than it was a decade ago. The company has made a deliberate choice to concentrate resources on fewer, larger digital brands rather than maintain a broad portfolio of print titles.

This strategy has a commercial logic: it is much easier to build a scaled digital subscription business around two or three major brands than to sustain profitability across a dozen smaller ones. But it also represents a contraction of the range of journalism Alma produces. Mediuutiset was a niche but important trade publication for Finland’s healthcare sector. The Optio and Fakta supplements provided long-form business and management journalism. Their loss narrows the group’s editorial range even if it improves the segment’s financial ratios.

The editorial workforce reduction, around 30 staff affected by the end-of-2024 negotiations, on top of the 7% average headcount decline visible in the segment figures for 2025, is the human dimension of this process. The News Media segment employed an average of 401 editorial staff in 2025, down from 431 in 2024.

AI is being deployed across the editorial operation with more ambition than most European news publishers are showing

Alma Media’s use of artificial intelligence in its journalism operation goes beyond the cautious, experimental approaches that most European news publishers have adopted. The company describes having moved from “experimentation to permanent use” of AI across all areas of the business, and the editorial applications in Alma News Media are substantive. Kauppalehti’s dynamic paywall uses AI to determine, article by article, which content should be gated. Iltalehti uses AI for sentiment analysis of reader engagement to guide editorial decisions. AI tools are deployed in comment moderation, subscription page optimisation, newsletter targeting, and search function improvement. The “Ask Kauppalehti” conversational interface represents a more experimental bet on AI-native content discovery.

Alma won the “Data Project of the Year” award at the AI Finland Gala in 2025 for Asuntopuntari (a housing market data tool developed within the Marketplaces segment) and was a finalist in the “Most Innovative AI Pilot” category for Jobly Vibes. These awards relate to the marketplace businesses rather than journalism, but they signal a genuine organisational capability for AI development that is being applied across the group including in the newsroom.

The editorial AI deployment raises questions that the company does not address directly in its financial reporting: how are editorial decisions made when AI tools influence what content readers see and what is paywalled? What are the editorial quality controls on AI-assisted content production? These are questions that Alma, like most news publishers adopting AI at scale, will face with increasing urgency in the years ahead.

Alma’s journalism is increasingly defined by what it is not: a print newspaper business

The share of digital business within the Alma News Media segment reached 62.6% of revenue in 2025, up from 59.1% in 2024. Print advertising declined by 22.7%, single-copy print sales fell by 4.7%, and print subscriptions fell by 11.2%. These are not exceptional rates of decline compared to other European news markets, but they are consistent and unidirectional. Alma sold its regional newspaper titles, Aamulehti, Satakunnan Kansa, and others in western and central Finland, in an earlier round of strategic disposals, and what remains of the group’s journalism operation has almost no meaningful print revenue exposure that is likely to grow.

The segment still generates revenue from print (content revenue of €50.8 million includes both print and digital subscriptions, with digital accounting for just over half) but the strategic assumption is clearly that print is a managed decline rather than a core asset. This is, broadly, the right call given the structural economics of Finnish print media. Total media advertising in Finland fell by 0.7% in 2025, and when social media and search are excluded, print-adjacent advertising declined by 3.0%. December 2025 saw an 8.8% year-on-year decline in Finnish media advertising. The market context does not support optimism about print revenue recovery.

The journalism unit’s long-term role inside Alma Media is becoming harder to define

Alma News Media is a profitable and improving business unit, but its strategic position within the group is worth examining. The company’s updated long-term financial targets — set in February 2025 — include a target adjusted operating margin of more than 30% for the group as a whole. The News Media segment achieved a 16.2% margin in 2025. The Marketplaces segment achieved 29.9%. Alma Career achieved 40.4%. The journalism operation is the lowest-margin business in the portfolio by a considerable distance.

This is not unusual for a news media operation within a diversified digital group as journalism inherently carries higher fixed costs (editorial staff, content production) and lower margin potential than platform businesses. But it does raise a strategic question that Alma does not directly address in its public communications: what role does journalism play in a company whose stated ambition is to become a leading provider of advanced commercial platform solutions? The CEO’s public statements consistently affirm a commitment to journalism and to the social value of quality news. The company’s financial targets push in a different direction.

For now, the two coexist: Alma’s journalism brands generate the audience data, advertising relationships, and subscription revenue that make the news operation worth owning; the marketplace businesses generate the margins that make the group investable. Whether that balance holds as the marketplace businesses grow and the journalism segment’s relative contribution continues to shrink is the central strategic question that 2026 and beyond will begin to answer.