RE Media

RE MEDIA SIA, the Valmiera-based company that produces and broadcasts ReTV, in 2025 reported net turnover up by 5.2% to €640,480 and net profit fell to €580 from €1,982 in 2024, the lowest profit number since the brief loss-making year of 2022. Equity has been negative every year since 2022 and stood at minus €46,403 at year-end. The filed average headcount was 11.

Behind those small absolute numbers is a national-level role. Since 1 January 2025, after TV24 and TV4 left the platform, ReTV is the only commercial channel in Latvia’s free terrestrial digital broadcasting, alongside the public-broadcaster channels LTV1 and LTV7 and the Ukrainian-language channel RADA; from 1 June 2025, two further commercial entrants, Radio SWH TV and the Catholic religious channel EWTN Latvija, joined for a 1 June 2025–31 December 2026 term. Since 1 October 2018 the parent company has been formally classified by the Register of Enterprises as “a commercial company of significance to national security”, the same designation that prompted TV4’s parent company to leave the platform at the end of 2024. RE MEDIA chose to stay.

The most striking line in the FY2025 filing is “other operating income”, which more than doubled from €205,011 to €418,961, accompanied by an almost three-fold rise in deferred income on the balance sheet, from €101,950 to €295,321. The share of total operating income coming from outside the channel’s commercial book has risen from about 25% in 2024 to about 40% in 2025. The company 2025 report does not break either line down by counterparty.

Key indicators (FY2025 vs FY2024)

Source: SIA “Re MEDIA” 2025 annual report filed 23 April 2026 with the Latvian State Revenue Service (EDS document 114037983); multi-year series via Latvian Register of Enterprises / Lursoft / Kombo.lv. The 2024 comparator employee count (9) is not stated in the 2025 filing itself; it is taken from the 2024 filing as reported by Lursoft / Kombo.lv. Figures in euro at filed reporting amount.

The annual-report headcount (11 in 2025, 9 in 2024 per the 2024 filing) and the State Revenue Service tax-payment headcount (18 in 2024) do not contradict each other: the annual-report figure counts payroll employees; the SRS figure includes everyone on whom social-insurance contributions were paid, including freelance contributors. The wider workforce that physically appears in front of and behind ReTV’s cameras is closer to the SRS number. A second note: revenue figures of around €1.05 million for 2018 and 2019 are real but include activity reorganised out of the parent company over 2020–2021. The comparable trajectory since 2022 (€518k → €555k → €609k → €640k) shows steady recovery in core sales while the “other operating income” line has become the dominant variable.

Ownership and corporate history

The company was incorporated on 8 October 2010 as SIA “Vidzemes televīzija”, the operating company of the long-established Valmiera-based regional broadcaster of the same name. It was Vidzemes televīzija that took the initiative in 2012 to bring twelve Latvian regional and local TV stations into a joint nationwide channel called Re:TV (later restyled as ReTV), using its own technical base in Valmiera. It became and remains the licensed broadcaster of that channel. On 9 March 2023 it was renamed SIA “Re MEDIA” to align the corporate name with the national-channel brand.

Ownership has changed twice in the past nine years. From March 2017 the company was held 69.98% by Baiba Ābele and 30.02% by Ingemārs Vekteris, after a Vekteris-controlled vehicle (then SIA “Valmieras TV”) had divested its full stake. In mid-February 2023, Vekteris exited and the company became wholly owned by a single natural person, Jurģis Ābele. NEPLP’s current ReTV broadcasting-licence document, the Lursoft / Firmas.lv participant data, and the 2025 Euromedia Ownership Monitor entry for ReTV / SIA “Re MEDIA” all give the same picture: 2,845 shares, 100% Jurģis Ābele, sole beneficial owner. The renaming of the company three weeks later was, in the words of its own announcement, designed to “more accurately reflect the activity of each medium”, ReTV being national and commercial, while a separate sister vehicle now carries the regional Vidzemes televīzija brand.

Day-to-day governance is provided by the management board, chaired by Elīna Leimane, who has spoken publicly for the company since at least the 2023 rebranding. The channel reports a monthly audience reach of around 700,000 viewers. In October 2018 the company received the formal status of “a commercial company of significance to national security” under the National Security Law; any future change of control therefore requires governmental review. That status mattered visibly in the 2024 free-to-air market: TV4’s parent company explicitly cited the same designation as a reason for leaving the platform at end-2024, since the regime adds compliance and review obligations on its parent. RE MEDIA chose to stay.

Asset map

The shape is unusual for a commercial broadcaster: ReTV is the country’s regional newsroom, scaled to national distribution, packaged into one programme. There is no print and no paid-streaming product. The primary audience is Latvian-speaking, with limited Russian-language programming reflecting the company’s role in the broader information-space mandate.

Signals

About 40% of operating income now comes from outside the channel’s commercial book

The €418,961 in the “other operating income” line for 2025, more than double the €205,011 of 2024, is an aggregate that the filed annual report does not break down by composition. Latvian small-company “other operating income” typically captures a mixed bag: project and public-commission grants, gains on disposal of fixed assets, foreign-exchange differences, recoveries, sponsorship and similar items. Given RE MEDIA’s long participation in NEPLP’s public-service-commissioning programme, past winners include “Latvijas stāsti”, “Re: SKATS”, “Ceturtā vara” and election-period titles, and given the matching near-tripling of deferred income on the liability side, the line is likely to be substantially composed of public service-commissioning and project funding.

The balance sheet has nearly doubled, almost entirely because of prepaid contract income

Total assets jumped from €204,791 to €388,751 in twelve months, an increase of €184,000. Almost all of that is matched, on the liability side, by a single line: deferred income (Nākamo periodu ieņēmumi), which rose from €101,950 to €295,321. In Latvian small-company accounting, that line is where prepaid contract instalments sit, recorded as a liability until the corresponding work is performed and accepted, at which point it becomes revenue. The 2025 jump is consistent with a sharp increase in pre-funded project and commissioning work, most plausibly through NEPLP’s public-service-commissioning framework for commercial media, although as noted in Signal 1 the filing itself does not name the counterparties.

Equity has been negative for four straight years

End-2025: minus €46,403. End-2024: minus €46,983. End-2023: minus €48,965. End-2022: minus €51,332. The trend is gently upward, but the company has reported negative equity on every year-end balance sheet since 2022. At the 2025 pace of profit retention (€580 a year), restoring equity to zero by retained earnings alone would take a very long time.

Negative equity is a financial constraint and a risk signal, not the same thing as a formal insolvency process: the Firmas.lv corporate record for RE MEDIA flags negative equity but separately shows no active insolvency, liquidation or reorganisation proceedings. What the balance sheet does mean in practice is that lenders, suppliers, freelance contributors and counterparties evaluating multi-year contracts may require trade-credit terms, advance payments or guarantees they would not require of a positive-equity counterparty. The €295,000 of prepaid contract income on the balance sheet is in part an expression of that constraint.

The workforce has shrunk from 16 to 11 over five years; the broader contributor base is much larger

The annual-report average headcount has fallen from 16 in 2020 to 12 in 2021, 10 in 2022–2024, and 11 in 2025. SRS tax-payment data, which captures every individual on whom social-insurance contributions were paid, peaked at 29 in 2021 and was 18 in 2024, consistently roughly double the annual-report figure. The shape is a tight core of permanent staff plus a network of freelance correspondents, regional contributors and on-screen presenters paid per project. For Latvia’s regional-television sector that is a functional model, but it means RE MEDIA does not employ the full workforce that produces the channel.

The 2025 public broadcaster merger and the 2021 advertising market exit are two different things

These are routinely conflated and deserve to be kept apart. On 1 January 2021, four years before the period covered by this filing, Latvia’s public service broadcasters left the commercial advertising market entirely. The state budget compensated this with €5.5 million for 2020 and €8.34 million more in 2021, €13.8 million in total. That structural shift, which delivered more advertising oxygen to small commercial broadcasters like ReTV, has been in place throughout the period in which RE MEDIA’s recent revenue trajectory has played out.

What did happen on 1 January 2025 is the merger: Latvijas Televīzija, Latvijas Radio and the LSM.lv portal were brought together into the unified Latvijas Sabiedriskais medijs. The merger consolidates governance, branding and infrastructure but does not by itself materially change the boundary between public service and commercial broadcasting. Its second-order risk for RE MEDIA is that a stronger, more centrally funded public broadcaster may face less political pressure to outsource public service production via NEPLP commissioning. The “Latvijas stāsti” model, a regional commercial broadcaster paid by the state to produce content the public broadcaster makes elsewhere in Europe, has long been criticised, including by Latvian regulator officials, as “free airtime for commercial broadcasters but uncontrolled public commissioning without money for content”. If LSM expands its regional production directly, the long-running format commissions on which RE MEDIA has depended could narrow rather than widen.

The journalism is operationally distinctive, and visibly under-resourced.

ReTV’s daily news service is staffed and produced from Valmiera, around 110 km north-east of Riga, the only national daily TV newsroom in Latvia not based in the capital. Its model is to pull regional content together, Vidzemes TV in Valmiera, Kurzemes TV in Liepāja and Talsi, Vidusdaugavas TV in Jēkabpils, Latgales reģionālā TV in Rēzekne, and broadcast it nationally. Latvian-language reporting from outside Riga is not a market that LSM can fully cover from its central facilities, and ReTV’s regional partner network is the densest in the country. The financial scale is striking when set against the public broadcaster: LSM is funded at a level the regulator has publicly described as one of the lowest among public broadcasters in the European Union, and ReTV is doing nationwide-distribution work on a small fraction of that budget, with eleven payroll employees and a publicly reported monthly audience of around 700,000.

The company’s publicly disclosed media-literacy and disinformation-resilience project, “No mītiem uz faktiem” (“From Myths to Facts”) (total cost €33,767, target audience 120,000, co-financed by the Emissions Quota Auctioning Instrument) is a small but concrete signal that this part of the work is taken seriously inside the company.

What to watch in 2026

Whatever fraction of that line is public service-commissioning, the next funding round is the most important external variable for RE MEDIA’s 2026 P&L, particularly whether the long-running regional-format commissions are renewed at present scale.

As for equity restoration, at the current pace, the company will not return to positive equity in any reasonable forward horizon without a capital injection or a structural change. The risk is not legal insolvency but a continuing constraint on commercial flexibility and counterparty trust. A shareholder decision to recapitalise would be one of the clearer signals of long-term commitment.

Sources. Primary: SIA “Re MEDIA” annual report for the period 1 January – 31 December 2025, EDS document 114037983, filed with the Latvian State Revenue Service on 23 April 2026; the report itself was approved on 23 March 2026. Multi-year financial indicators from the Latvian Register of Enterprises via Lursoft / Kombo.lv. Corporate history and ownership: Register of Enterprises records; the corporate name change from SIA “Vidzemes televīzija” to SIA “Re MEDIA” on 9 March 2023 and the contemporary 100% transfer to Jurģis Ābele as reported by LETA / Firmas.lv on 13 March 2023; current ownership and beneficial owner as published by NEPLP in the ReTV broadcasting-licence document and as recorded in Firmas.lv participant data; corroborated in the 2025 Euromedia Ownership Monitor entry for Re:TV / SIA Re Media. National-security designation: Register of Enterprises entry of 1 October 2018. Channel-list changes in free terrestrial broadcasting (1 January 2025 and 1 June 2025): NEPLP and LVRTC announcements, reported by LSM.lv and other Latvian outlets. Public-service advertising-market exit on 1 January 2021 and the €5.5m + €8.34m compensation: Latvian Ministry of Finance, NEPLP, and contemporaneous LSM.lv reporting. Public-service merger of LTV, Latvian Radio and the LSM.lv portal into Latvijas Sabiedriskais medijs with effect from 1 January 2025: SEPLP and Saeima documents. Editorial information: retv.lv, the company’s own statements as quoted by LETA and Vidzemes Augstskola, and the Valmieras Attīstības aģentūra ICT-sector overview. NEPLP public-commission tender history: NEPLP at neplp.lv. All figures in euro at the filed reporting amount.