Hanza Media

Hanza Media, Croatia’s leading domestically owned national-scale newspaper publisher and the company behind the daily Jutarnji list, the regional daily Slobodna Dalmacija, the sports daily Sportske novosti and the women’s weekly Gloria, reported revenue of €39.1 million for 2025, up 2.2% on 2024, but profit slipped 8% to €434,000. That is a net margin of roughly 1.1% on a business that produces a substantial share of Croatia’s full-price print journalism. Headcount fell 2.7% to 613, the fifth straight year of staff reductions, and the company’s equity dropped 10% in a single year. Hanza Media is making money. It is not making much.

The headline reads “second consecutive year of revenue growth.” The data reads: a print publisher with shrinking margins, a working-capital squeeze that has pushed its current-liquidity ratio below 1.0 for the first time in the published five-year series, a payroll cut from 715 to 613 people since 2021, the discontinuation of the political weekly Globus at the end of 2025 after 35 years, and a country where only 6% of adults pay for online news, one of the lowest rates in any of the 48 markets the Reuters Institute surveys.

Hanza Media: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: Hanza Media d.o.o., financial data filed with the Croatian Financial Agency (FINA), as displayed in the Fina Info.BIZ BON-1 report dated 30 April 2026 (single-entity unconsolidated accounts, not the consolidated group). Personal identification number (OIB): 79517545745. Currency: EUR.

Hanza Media is controlled by the Hanžeković family. Ana Hanžeković Krznarić holds 20.55% of the company directly, while KCV savjetovanje d.o.o. holds the remaining 79.45%. KCV savjetovanje is owned by Dora Hanžeković Žuža (with Ana Hanžeković Krznarić co-founding it in 2013); on the basis of those direct and indirect holdings, the two sisters split economic control of Hanza Media between them. Their late father, Marijan Hanžeković, a prominent Zagreb lawyer known in Croatia as the “king of debt enforcement”, acquired the predecessor company, Europapress Holding (EPH), in May 2014 from the Austrian bank Hypo Alpe-Adria, after EPH had collapsed into pre-bankruptcy with debts of more than €100 million. Marijan Hanžeković died of a long illness on 28 January 2018, aged 66; the business passed to his daughters. Hanza Media exited pre-bankruptcy in 2019, five years ahead of schedule, having repaid creditors entirely from its own operating cash flow. The Karlovac Commercial Court formally cleared the settlement on 20 February 2020.

In Croatia, three media companies,Styria, Hanza Media, and Media Solutions, control most of the print market. Inside that picture, Hanza Media is the leading domestically owned national-scale print and newsroom group: Styria is Austrian, and the other domestically owned publishers are mostly regional. So Hanza’s position in Croatian press is structural, it is not just “a major publisher” but specifically the major domestically owned national-scale newsroom group. That is why the trajectory of the company matters disproportionately to the country’s media-pluralism picture.

The competitive context is harsh in a different way. Croatia’s tabloid daily 24sata, owned by Austrian Styria, is the bestselling daily in the country, and Styria’s Večernji list is also a major national daily. Jutarnji list, the Hanza flagship, is one of Croatia’s leading general-information full-price dailies and commands a 20–30% share of the general-information daily-newspaper market by the most recent competition-authority data, politically among the most influential dailies, even where it is not the largest in volume. The Hanza titles cluster around the centre-left of the Croatian political spectrum.

The same Croatian press landscape that supports Hanza Media’s position also exposes its journalists to the country’s most distinctive risk: strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs. The Croatian Journalists’ Association reported 752 active lawsuits against journalists in 2024 (down from 945 in 2023). A 2024 study by the Centre for Democracy and Law Miko Tripalo, analysing 1,333 court rulings between 2016 and 2023, found that 41% had at least one SLAPP characteristic, and that cases took an average of four years, with most judgments ultimately favouring the journalists. Defamation and insult remain criminal offences in Croatia, and Croatia still lacks a domestic anti-SLAPP framework. The financial cost of defending these cases is borne by the publishers, including Hanza Media. One open-source analysis has estimated that Hanza Media itself faced hundreds of active lawsuits, but Hanza does not publish a comparable figure of its own and the estimate should not be treated as independently verified.

Hanza Media: asset map

Signals

Profit is shrinking even as revenue grows

For two years running, Hanza Media has put more cash through the till and ended up with less. Operating income rose 2.2% in 2025 (€38.25m → €39.10m) after rising 4.0% in 2024. Profit went the other way: from €1.10m in 2023 to €471,000 in 2024 to €434,000 in 2025. The 2025 profit is barely a quarter of what the company earned in 2021 (€1.66m) on revenue that was lower then. Both EBITDA (€3.06m) and EBIT (€1.57m) edged down again. The five-year arc, according to our data collected from the local trade registry FINA, is a company gradually spending more to earn the same revenue, a pattern consistent with what every European print publisher has been navigating: rising paper, distribution and salary costs squeezing margins on a stagnant top line.

The salary increase visible in the 2025 numbers tells part of the story. Hanza Media’s gross average monthly salary rose 6.7% to €1,338, well ahead of revenue growth. The headcount cut (630 → 613) absorbed only part of that wage pressure. The same arithmetic, repeated for several years in a row, is what gets you from a 4.6% return on assets in 2021 to 1.24% in 2025.

The current-liquidity ratio just broke below 1.0

The most striking single number in the BON-1 extract is buried in the ratio table: Hanza Media’s current liquidity ratio fell from 1.37 in 2024 to 0.95 in 2025. In plain language, a ratio below 1.0 means the company’s short-term liabilities now exceed its current assets, meaning that, on paper, it would not be able to cover its near-term obligations from cash, receivables and inventories alone. The company’s “financial stability ratio” rose from 0.85 to 1.00 over the same period, which is the same point looked at from the other direction: long-term funding sources are now exactly equal to long-term assets, leaving no buffer for short-term needs.

This is not a default warning. The company is profitable, but the 2025 deterioration relative to 2024 is real, and it sits alongside a 10% drop in equity and reserves (€15.19m → €13.65m) that the published datasets do not explain. Possible causes include a profit distribution to the owners, a registered-share-capital reduction or other equity movements.

The headcount has fallen 14% since 2021

Hanza Media’s full-year-equivalent headcount has dropped each year of the past five: 715 in 2021, 679 in 2022, 636 in 2023, 630 in 2024, 613 in 2025. That’s a cumulative reduction of 102 jobs, or 14%. Most of the reduction happened in the first two years (2021–2023), with a slower bleed since.

The newsroom-vs-other-functions split is not disclosed in the company’s filing. But there are at least two visible indicators that working conditions have been a live issue. In February 2024, the Trade Union of Croatian Journalists and the Union of Graphic and Media Workers entered formal collective-bargaining negotiations with Hanza Media, something neither party had done in many years. On 31 May 2024, after roughly four months of talks, Hanza Media unilaterally walked away from the table, citing in writing that it could not reach agreement on key issues, “particularly those related to the material rights of employees.” The unions called the decision unilateral; in their own follow-up statement, the unions also acknowledged that even though formal bargaining had collapsed, some employee rights were improved as a result of the talks. As of the most recent public reporting, the formal negotiations have not resumed.

Separately, in December 2024, Croatian media-industry outlet Media Daily reported that a Zagreb municipal labour court had ruled against Hanza Media in an employment dispute that ran for more than 11 years, with damages and costs totalling just over €173,000. The detail of the underlying claim was not disclosed.

A digital paywall has been introduced into one of the toughest pay-for-news markets in Europe

Hanza Media has been pushing into reader-paid digital, in line with most European publishers. Jutarnji list introduced a digital subscription several years ago; Slobodna Dalmacija followed on 18 May 2023. The company has also launched native digital magazines (Gloria Glam, Appeal) and the Hanza Hub events platform.

The macro headwind is severe as only 6% of Croatian adults paid for any kind of online news in the past year, according to data from Reuters Institute.

A 35-year-old political weekly was shut down at the end of 2025

On 23 December 2025, Hanza Media announced that the next day’s issue of Globus, the political weekly that had been published continuously in Zagreb since 1990, and that had been the founding title of the predecessor company Europapress Holding, would be its last. The editorial decision, the company said, came after “a thorough analysis of market conditions and business circumstances, with the aim of long-term securing of quality content and a sustainable mode of publishing.” From January 2026, Globus columnists and contributors moved into the print and online editions of Jutarnji list.

That is the most concrete editorial signal of where Hanza Media’s print economics now sit. Globus was launched in December 1990 by a group of former Vjesnik journalists, including Ninoslav Pavić (the founder of EPH), Denis Kuljiš and Marko Grčić. By summer 1991 it was reaching a circulation of 100,000; the Christmas issue of that first wartime year printed 200,000. It was, for much of the 1990s and 2000s, one of the most-read political weeklies in the region. Its closure 35 years later is the kind of decision that you can only make once, there is no undoing it, and Hanza’s framing of “sustainable mode of publishing” suggests that, in 2025, the standalone economics of a print political weekly no longer worked even for a company with the scale and synergies of Hanza Media.

What to watch in 2026

The unanswered question is whether Hanza Media’s domestic print model can keep generating profit at all by 2027 or 2028. The 2025 numbers show a company that is still in the black, has paid down its post-2014 debt, and is investing in digital subscriptions and events, but is also gradually losing margin and equity, has just slipped below the 1.0 current-liquidity threshold for the first time in the published series, and has just shut down its 35-year-old political weekly. None of those signals individually constitutes distress; together, they describe a publisher that has very little room left for shocks.

Two concrete things will shape the 2026 reading. First, whether the digital-subscription rollout at Jutarnji list and Slobodna Dalmacija finally starts producing meaningful revenue in a country where only 6% of adults pay for any online news. Second, whether collective-bargaining negotiations with the journalists’ union resume, and on what terms, because the trajectory of headcount and average wages will determine whether Hanza Media’s margin slide accelerates or stabilises.

Two structural questions sit underneath all of that. Whether the Hanžeković sisters, having now run the company since 2018, are committed long-term owners, or whether at some point a sale becomes a real possibility, most plausibly to one of the foreign groups that already dominates the rest of the Croatian print market. And whether Croatia’s continuing failure to legislate against SLAPPs leaves a structural overhang on every Croatian newsroom group, Hanza Media included, that no amount of cost discipline can offset. The 2025 financial filing does not answer either of those questions. It does establish, more clearly than any single prior year of data, that the largest domestically owned national-scale Croatian publisher is still profitable, but is becoming gradually less so, on roughly the same revenue, with materially fewer journalists than in 2021, and with one of its founding titles now closed.