Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)

The AG für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Swiss publishing group whose flagship is the 246-year-old newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, reported total operating revenue of CHF 236.4 million (approximately EUR 252m / US$285m) for the financial year ended 31 December 2025, down 5% from CHF 248.3 million in 2024. Adjusted operating profit was CHF 12.7 million (approximately EUR 13.6m / US$15.3m), against CHF 16.6 million a year earlier, a 23% decline. On a reported basis, before adjustments, the group posted an operating loss of CHF 38.6 million and a net loss of CHF 34.5 million, primarily reflecting CHF 42.6 million of goodwill written back through the income statement on the disposal of the Zurich Film Festival, the Spoundation film companies and the Architonic design platform.

The reported loss overstates the operational picture. Swiss GAAP FER allows goodwill from past acquisitions to be charged directly against equity at the time of purchase, with a corresponding reversal through the income statement on disposal. The 2025 loss is therefore an accounting reflection of portfolio pruning rather than a trading deterioration. The group’s adjusted net result, at CHF 16.9 million, was 1% above 2024. Equity rose slightly to CHF 213.3 million and the capital ratio (Eigenfinanzierungsgrad) climbed from 53.9% to 60.8% as the company repaid the CHF 40 million long-term loan taken to fund its 2024 acquisition of a 25% stake in the outdoor advertising company APG|SGA, leaving only a CHF 40 million short-term tranche outstanding at year-end.

NZZ is a private, unlisted Swiss stock corporation whose 40,000 registered shares are held by 3,313 shareholders, none of whom may hold more than 1%. Under the statutes, shareholders must be adult Swiss citizens who are either members of the liberal party FDP.Die Liberalen or can otherwise document a freisinnig-demokratische political disposition, one of the most distinctive ownership arrangements in European media.

AG für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, key financial indicators

Source: AG für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Geschäftsbericht 2025, Konzernrechnung (consolidated accounts, Swiss GAAP FER). Audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers AG, sign-off 12 March 2026. EUR and USD conversions based on the ECB 2025 annual average (EUR 1 = CHF 0.9370; EUR 1 = USD 1.1300, Deutsche Bundesbank) and are indicative.

Revenue by segment and type, FY2025

Source: NZZ Geschäftsbericht 2025, Konzernerfolgsrechnung, Notes 1.1-1.4

NZZ’s principal media assets and associates

Source: NZZ Geschäftsbericht 2025, Note 3.7 (Beteiligungen). Stakes as at 31 December 2025

Signals

Signal one: reader-paid journalism is doing exactly what NZZ said it would, which is gradually becoming the whole business

The 2025 accounts show the reader-paid side of the business holding up while other revenue streams shrink. Revenue from subscriptions and single copies (Lesermarkt) rose by CHF 1.6 million to CHF 95.1 million, despite a modest dip in the total subscriber base from 212,600 to 208,800 at the end of 2025. Inside that headline, the digital premium product NZZ Pro more than doubled its base to over 20,000 subscribers, average revenue per digital subscriber increased by 8% in Switzerland and by 22% in Germany, and total digital revenue in Germany grew by 26%. Total advertising revenue fell by 4% to CHF 99.3 million, with print advertising down 5% to CHF 31.7 million and, more tellingly, partnership revenue down by CHF 8.7 million to CHF 12.3 million, largely because the Zurich Film Festival, historically a significant partnership vehicle, is no longer part of the perimeter. The digital advertising line grew 12% to CHF 55.2 million, helped by the Attackera agency acquired in October 2024 and by audienzz’s German expansion. In aggregate, reader payments contributed 48% of total operating revenue in 2025 (up from 46% in 2024), advertising held broadly flat at 42%, and other revenue, dominated by IT services NZZ was still providing to CH Media under the 2018 disentanglement agreement, fell from 12% to 10%. For a broadsheet newspaper, that trajectory is the number the next decade will be fought over, and NZZ’s is heading in the direction the industry has been told it must go.

Signal two: the portfolio is being pruned back to a publishing core and an outdoor advertising anchor

Between July 2025 and April 2026, NZZ will have disposed of five non-core investments and increased a sixth. The Zurich Film Festival and the two associated film companies Spoundation Motion Picture and Frame Cinema were sold in July 2025 to the festival’s existing leadership and to KINOKONI AG respectively. The Architonic architecture-and-design platform was sold to the US group Sandow Companies in December 2025, effectively exiting the DAAily platforms business. A 12% minority stake in the fintech Qontis was sold to CREALOGIX the same month. From 1 April 2026, the remaining 35% stake in CH Media, the regional newspaper, radio and television group that NZZ helped create in 2018 and whose share it reduced to 35% in 2024, is being sold to the other founding shareholder, AZ Medien. Moving in the other direction, NZZ announced in December 2025 that it intends to increase its stake in APG|SGA, Switzerland’s leading outdoor advertising company, from 25% to 45%. At CHF 220 per share, the further 20% costs CHF 132.0 million and is partly debt-financed, with completion expected in the second quarter of 2026 subject to competition clearance. What remains once these transactions close is straightforward: the core publishing business (NZZ, NZZ am Sonntag, the German bureau, the B2B digital advertising arm audienzz), two concessioned Swiss regional TV stations (Tele 1 and TVO), and a 45% stake in an outdoor advertising infrastructure company. The group describes APG as providing a stable, AI-resilient revenue stream. That framing, treating physical outdoor billboards as a hedge against the disintermediation of digital publishing, is unusual among European media groups and is now NZZ’s signature strategic bet.

Signal three: the group’s response to AI is to train every editorial employee and to buy infrastructure that AI cannot disintermediate

The chair’s letter describes AI as a shift comparable to the printing press and the industrial revolution, and notes that 2025 was the first year in which more English-language articles were AI-generated than human-written. NZZ’s operational response has two visible components. In the newsroom, every editorial employee has completed a three-day AI training programme developed with the MAZ (Institut für Journalismus und Kommunikation). The programme establishes a ‘human-in-the-loop’ principle, in which AI tools support research and preparation of content but editorial responsibility remains with people. In the commercial architecture, NZZ launched a new IT strategy in 2025 that positions AI and customer experience as the two governing design principles of its technology stack. Structurally, it has also re-organised product development so that editorial, marketing and technology work in integrated teams, rather than as separate functions. The premise connecting all of this is that, in a media market where AI systems consume and regurgitate journalistic content without payment, the defensive moat has to be built on two things: direct, paid customer relationships with readers who will not be routed through an AI intermediary, and revenue streams that AI systems cannot substitute for. Subscriber growth addresses the first. The APG expansion addresses the second.

Signal four: a 19th-century shareholder restriction still shapes who owns Switzerland’s leading liberal newspaper

Under the statutes of the AG für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, entry in the share register, and therefore the exercise of shareholder rights, requires that the acquirer be an adult Swiss citizen who is either a member of FDP.Die Liberalen (the Free Democratic Party of Switzerland) or can otherwise document a freisinnig-demokratische Grundhaltung, a liberal-democratic political disposition. Individual holdings are capped at 1% of the capital. These provisions, inherited from the 19th-century tradition in which NZZ was founded as an explicitly political paper of the liberal movement, remain in force in 2026 and continue to govern admission to the share register. The practical effect is that the newspaper is owned by a broad base of 3,313 ideologically-screened Swiss citizens, with no single controlling block and no foreign shareholders of consequence. The economic consequences are visible in the accounts: a capital ratio of 60.8%, no external equity pressure, no takeover vulnerability, and a corresponding editorial independence that management explicitly identifies as a commercial strength. The governance arrangement is anachronistic in form, but it produces the kind of ownership dispersion that regulators in France, Germany and Italy have in recent years been trying to engineer through legislation. In NZZ’s case, the articles of association already did it, nearly a century earlier.

Signal five: Germany is where the growth is, and NZZ is now ranked the most trustworthy news brand in a market six times its home

NZZ’s German operation, run out of Berlin through NZZ (Deutschland) GmbH, is small in absolute terms but is the only meaningful growth market in the group. Total digital revenue in Germany rose 26% in 2025, average revenue per digital subscriber increased 22%, and the Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach study cited in the Annual Report recorded growth in both recognition and reach. Two external measures support the group’s positioning. In Switzerland, the Jahrbuch Qualität der Medien 2025, published by the University of Zurich’s research centre fög, rated NZZ first for overall quality among Swiss news brands for 2025. In Germany, the Media Brand Trust Monitor ranked the Neue Zürcher Zeitung as the most trustworthy news brand in Germany, ahead of every incumbent German quality newspaper. This is an unusual outcome: a 246-year-old Swiss paper being rated above long-established German quality titles in their own home market. The business rationale is clear. The German-language quality-journalism market is roughly six times the size of the Swiss one, and its incumbents have been weakened by circulation decline, ownership changes and the closure or restructuring of several regional mastheads. NZZ’s strategy is to occupy the upper-quality position with a modest but growing subscriber base, supported by a bespoke digital premium product (NZZ Pro) and a local advertising sales capacity (audienzz’s new German presence). The 2025 numbers suggest the strategy is scaling at the rate the group needs it to.

Outlook

NZZ ended 2025 with CHF 61.9 million in cash, CHF 40.0 million of short-term financial debt (the remaining APG-financing tranche, due for repayment in 2026) and no long-term financial debt following repayment of the matching CHF 40 million long-term tranche during the year, a capital ratio of 60.8%, and a pension fund that was 121% funded.

Management describes the financial year 2026 as continuing to be shaped by investment in growth and by a demanding market environment, with the benefits of those investments expected to become visible from 2027 onwards. The two post-balance-sheet transactions, the APG stake increase and the CH Media exit, will reshape the balance sheet and the income statement in ways that will not be fully visible until the 2027 accounts. What is already visible in the 2025 disclosures is a group that has committed to a narrower, more defensible strategic footprint: high-quality paid journalism as the revenue foundation, cross-border growth concentrated in Germany, and a substantial minority investment in physical outdoor advertising as insurance against the disintermediation of digital publishing. Whether that combination generates the returns needed to fund continued investment in journalism is the question the 2027 accounts will begin to answer.

Sources: AG für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Geschäftsbericht 2025, approved by the Board of Directors on 12 March 2026, to be submitted for adoption to the Annual General Meeting on Saturday 18 April 2026. Consolidated financial statements prepared under Swiss GAAP FER and audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers AG (lead auditor Thomas Wallmer; mandate since 1999). Supplementary context: NZZ press release ‘Jahresergebnis 2025: NZZ steigert Ertrag im Lesermarkt und investiert in künftiges Wachstum’ (unternehmen.nzz.ch, 25 March 2026); NZZ corporate information portal (unternehmen.nzz.ch); Medienmonitor Schweiz (medienmonitor-schweiz.ch). FX rates: Deutsche Bundesbank, Euro Foreign Exchange Reference Rates, annual averages 2025.