TX Group

TX Group closed 2025 with revenue down 7.3% and profitability broadly flat on an adjusted basis, a result that management presents as progress in what chairman Pietro Supino described as “once again highly challenging” conditions. The headline numbers look worse than the underlying reality, because 2024 free cash flow was boosted by a non-recurring distribution related to SMG Swiss Marketplace Group, and the 2024 revenue base included businesses disposed of during that year. Without those effects, the picture is of a group managing a genuinely difficult structural transition: its media businesses are shrinking, its marketplace investments are growing strongly, and the organisation is refashioning itself around digital products and marketplace assets while shrinking its legacy print infrastructure.

TX Group: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: TX Group Annual Report 2025, published 18 March 2026. EUR equivalents converted at the 2025 annual average exchange rate of 1 CHF = 1.0673 EUR

TX Group is a Zurich-based media and digital platforms company listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. It was founded in 1893 as a newspaper publisher (the Tages-Anzeiger) and remains Switzerland’s largest media group by revenue and reach. The group is controlled by members of the founding family acting through a shareholders’ agreement, which held 66.84% of registered shares at year-end 2025; chairman Pietro Supino also serves as Publisher. The group’s activities span paid journalism (through Tamedia), free digital news (through 20 Minuten), advertising marketing (through Goldbach), digital job classifieds (through JobCloud, 50% owned), and marketplace investments including a 31.14% stake in the newly listed SMG Swiss Marketplace Group.

TX Group: journalism and media asset map

Signals

Revenue fell sharply, but the organic decline is more moderate

Total revenues declined CHF 68.4 million (-7.3%) to CHF 873.1 million (€932 million). That is a meaningful drop, but it requires decomposition before conclusions can be drawn. A substantial portion of the decline is inorganic: TX Group sold Goldbach Austria, dreifive Group, and Heute in Austria during 2024, and these are no longer in the consolidation perimeter. When measuring only businesses present in both years, the organic revenue decline is lower, approximately -4.6% for the group overall, -2.6% for Goldbach, and -6.5% for Tamedia on an organic basis.

Even the organic decline reflects several structural forces operating simultaneously: a weak Swiss job market weighing on JobCloud; the ongoing decline in the traditional Swiss advertising market; difficult conditions for digital advertising marketing; and declining printing revenues, partly caused by the closure of the Lausanne printing centre. Not all of these are equally permanent. The job market pressure is cyclical. The print declines are structural. The digital advertising disruption in 2025 was partly transitional, caused by the reintegration of advertising sales from Goldbach back to Tamedia and 20 Minuten at the start of the year, a process that created a ramp-up phase in the first half before recovering in the second.

EBITDA improved substantially despite the revenue decline

The most striking number in the report: despite losing CHF 68.4 million of revenue, TX Group increased EBITDA by CHF 22.7 million (+13.5%) to CHF 190.2 million (€203 million), expanding the EBITDA margin from 17.8% to 21.8%. The explanation lies in aggressive cost reduction. Personnel expenses fell organically by CHF 23.6 million, reflecting a net reduction of 222 FTEs and significant wage and salary savings from efficiency programmes and organisational simplification. The 2024 figure had also been inflated by provisions, CHF 13.0 million for the repayment of short-time work compensation and CHF 19.5 million in restructuring charges, neither of which recurred at meaningful scale in 2025. The cost of materials and services fell sharply, partly from lower paper volumes and partly from the Lausanne printing centre closure.

On the adjusted normalised basis used by management (EBIT adj.) operating income was CHF 102.0 million (€109 million), down just 1.4% on 2024, while the margin improved from 11.0% to 11.7%. The framing of “broadly flat profitability” is therefore accurate at this level of analysis. The result is that while the group’s revenues are declining, its cost base is declining faster, and the profitability of the residual business is improving.

Tamedia turned the corner, but its journalism business remains under pressure

Tamedia, the segment containing all of Switzerland’s paid journalism brands, had the sharpest turnaround in 2025. Its revenues fell 5.9% to CHF 385.7 million (€412 million), continuing a multi-year structural trend. Subscription and single-copy sales fell 4.4% to CHF 212.0 million; print advertising declined; and printing and logistics revenue dropped 19.1%, partly from the Lausanne centre closure. But on profitability, the segment swung from an EBITDA loss of CHF 16.9 million in 2024 to an EBITDA profit of CHF 10.2 million in 2025. On an adjusted basis, EBIT adj. rose from CHF 2.6 million to CHF 11.5 million. This turnaround was achieved through strict cost management, the reintegration of advertising sales in-house, and strategic focus on four core digital brands: Tages-Anzeiger, Berner Zeitung, Basler Zeitung, and 24 heures.

The digital indicators were encouraging. Traffic to core brand websites grew 5% year-on-year, digital advertising grew approximately 30%, and digital subscriptions reached 199,000 at year-end 2025, up 5% on the prior year, within a total paid subscription base of 613,000. Average revenue per digital user continued to rise. But the overall revenue trajectory has not yet reversed: the growth in digital subscriptions and digital advertising is not yet large enough to compensate for the continuing decline in print subscription revenue, print advertising, and printing volumes. Tamedia also increased its FTE count by 49 in 2025, primarily driven by the reintegration of advertising sales functions, adding headcount in a declining-revenue business before those commercial changes generate offsetting income.

20 Minuten ended its print edition: a structural milestone

In late 2025, 20 Minuten discontinued its printed daily newspaper, becoming a purely digital news operation from 2026. The financial consequences were visible throughout the year: segment revenues fell 15.9% to CHF 85.6 million (€91 million), with advertising revenue down 15.5%, and EBITDA collapsing from CHF 9.2 million to CHF 3.3 million. The adjusted EBIT fell 65.9% to CHF 2.7 million. On an organic basis, excluding the disposed Austrian Heute operation and reduced internal Tamedia services, the revenue decline was 7.4%.

The picture had two distinct halves. In the first half, the new in-house advertising sales team was in a ramp-up phase, and digital advertising revenue fell 8.7% year-on-year. In the second half, that same team delivered digital advertising revenue 3.2% above the prior year, and 24% above the first half. The editorial teams for German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland were merged under a single editor-in-chief at year-end, as the organisation reduced complexity for its digital future.

20 Minuten was launched in 1999 as a commuter newspaper for a young, urban audience and became Switzerland’s highest-reach single news brand. The closure of its print edition is not primarily a financial event (the print product had long been loss-making relative to the digital operation) but an editorial one. The purely digital organisation that emerges from 2026 will reach its audience differently, with different format constraints and different editorial rhythms, than the daily print commuter newspaper did.

Goldbach is restructuring around three pillars, but 2025 disappointed

Goldbach, the group’s advertising marketing operation, is being reshaped around three core activities: TV advertising sales, out-of-home (OOH) advertising through Goldbach Neo, and digital and radio advertising. Activities outside these pillars, namely regional marketing, the technology provider AdUnit, the programmatic DSP Splicky, and the Berlin-based Goldvertise, were sold or closed during the year. The segment shed 226 FTEs, a reduction of 29.6%.

Revenues fell 17.7% to CHF 236.1 million (€252 million), though on a truly organic basis, excluding the 2024 disposals and the structural reintegration of Tamedia and 20 Minuten advertising inventories into those companies’ own marketing departments, the organic decline was 2.6%. The adjusted EBIT fell 34.5% to CHF 15.4 million, with the margin contracting from 8.2% to 6.5%. Management explicitly described the overall result as “significantly below expectations.” The shortfall was attributable to a provision for an onerous OOH marketing contract in the first half, restructuring costs from staff reductions, weak advertising market conditions in the second half, which the company’s annual report notes came under “considerable pressure” in the fourth quarter, as it did in 2024, and losses at Goldbach Regional before its year-end closure.

Within these difficulties, the out-of-home business continued to grow: Goldbach Neo OOH grew 2.5% organically, and the out-of-home market in Switzerland has more than tripled over the past decade due to digital screen expansion. Replay TV advertising was also a particular strength, with revenues doubling for the second consecutive year.

SMG’s IPO was the year’s most consequential strategic event

In September 2025, SMG Swiss Marketplace Group (a network of digital classifieds platforms covering real estate, automotive, general marketplaces, and financial comparison) was listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. TX Group holds 31.14% and is the company’s largest single shareholder. The IPO was described by the chairman as a success, but a sector-wide correction beginning in late October led to significant downward pressure on the share price in the final months of the year. TX Group responded by purchasing an additional 414,771 shares at a cost of CHF 13.3 million, increasing its stake.

SMG is not consolidated in TX Group’s income statement (it is accounted for at equity) and contributes primarily through the “share of net result of associates” line in the TX Markets segment. The segment’s EBIT adj. was CHF 89.1 million (€95 million) in 2025, with a margin of 78.6%. SMG reported double-digit revenue growth and further margin improvements during the year.

The listing matters beyond quarterly financial contributions. It establishes a public market valuation for the asset, creates liquidity for existing shareholders, and gives TX Group a transparent measure of the investment’s worth. The IPO process also brought additional one-off costs in 2025, which slightly reduced the segment’s net result compared to what the underlying business performance would otherwise imply.

The workforce shrank by more than 340 FTEs in a single year

Total headcount fell by 342.6 FTEs to 2,978, a reduction of 10.3%. This reflects several simultaneous forces: the disposal of Goldbach Austria and related entities in 2024 (inorganic); the reintegration of advertising sales into Tamedia and 20 Minuten (a redistribution of FTEs between segments); targeted efficiency programmes across central functions; and the closure of the Lausanne printing centre. The 84-FTE reduction in central Group functions included approximately half attributable to the transfer of TX Services Belgrade personnel to SMG, with the remainder from decentralisation and synergy programmes.

Organic personnel expenses fell by CHF 23.6 million, confirming that a meaningful portion of the headcount reduction generated real cost savings rather than merely reflecting structural reorganisation. The report does not disclose how many of the organic reductions came from editorial as opposed to commercial or technical functions — a gap in transparency that is particularly relevant for a group whose primary public justification rests on the quality of its journalism.

The underlying picture: a group halfway through a transition it cannot avoid

TX Group’s 2025 results are the portrait of a company in the middle of a structural shift from which there is no retreat. The print businesses are contracting and will continue to contract. The digital businesses, subscriptions, advertising, marketplaces, are growing, but not yet large enough to compensate in revenue terms. The group is managing this gap by reducing costs aggressively, which has improved profitability on an adjusted basis, but has also reduced the workforce, closed infrastructure, and reshaped the editorial organisation at Tamedia and 20 Minuten.

The journalism TX Group produces, in Tages-Anzeiger, 24 heures, SonntagsZeitung, and the other Tamedia titles, remains among the most trusted and widely read quality journalism in Switzerland. The group has introduced a new quality monitoring system at Tamedia and committed to maintaining editorial responsibility at the centre of its strategy. Whether the smaller, leaner organisation that emerges from this transformation can sustain that journalism at the same breadth and depth is a question that 2025’s numbers, however carefully parsed, cannot yet answer. The financial architecture is being rebuilt; the editorial commitment is asserted; the outcome depends on choices that are still being made.