Adria News Production

Adria News Production, produkcija vsebin in marketing, d.o.o., the Ljubljana company that operates n1info.si, the Slovenian arm of the regional N1 news brand, filed its FY2025 annual report with AJPES showing net profit of €19,037, down 90 percent from €190,078 the year before, on net sales that were almost unchanged at €2,895,276 (down 0.9% from €2,921,932). Derived operating profit / EBIT fell 85% from €249,999 to €36,948. The company’s operating-revenue line moved by less than one percent in either direction; what compressed it was the cost side. The combined costs of goods, materials and services rose 14.2%, with service costs alone up 15.8%; labour costs rose 5.6% on essentially flat headcount; and total write-downs rose 5.4%, although depreciation and amortisation themselves fell 9.4%: the increase came from new revaluation/write-down expense on operating current assets. The squeeze took an otherwise stable digital newsroom from comfortably profitable to running barely above break-even.

Behind those line items is one of the more turbulent years in the recent history of the parent group. United Group, the Southeastern European telecoms-and-media platform that ultimately owns N1 Slovenia through Adria News S.à r.l. (Luxembourg) and United Media (Netherlands), spent FY2025 selling its Serbian telecoms business to a foreign consortium, monetising sports and DTH assets to the Serbian state telecom, replacing its founder and CEO under pressure from majority owner BC Partners, fighting a UK court case in which the founder won a €250 million settlement, and absorbing leaked OCCRP reporting on a Belgrade meeting between the new United Group CEO and the state telco’s CEO that observers read as a discussion of how to weaken N1. In February 2026, after the FY2025 reporting period closed but before the AJPES filing was signed, United Group’s news operations across five countries, including N1 Slovenia, were placed under a new independent governance structure called Adria News Network with its own board chaired by a former CNN executive. None of that group-level drama is visible in the Slovenian company’s accounts, but it is the context against which any reader of those accounts has to interpret them.

Key indicators (FY2025 vs FY2024)

Source: Adria News Production d.o.o. annual report for the period 1 January – 31 December 2025, filed with AJPES (Agencija Republike Slovenije za javnopravne evidence in storitve). Multi-year cross-checks via ebonitete.si and bizi.si. The “average employees” line is calculated on the basis of work hours in the period and so will be lower than headline payroll headcount; ebonitete.si reports 37 employees for 2024.

Ownership and corporate history

Adria News Production d.o.o. is the Slovenian operating company of the N1 news brand. It was incorporated in December 2020 and opened its first bank account at UniCredit Banka Slovenija on 2 December 2020. Its Slovenian activity classification is J59.110, production of films, video and TV programmes, which is structurally important: the company is a content producer, not a licensed broadcaster, and has no over-the-air TV channel in Slovenia. N1 Slovenia is digital-only, a web portal, n1info.si, with embedded video shows produced from the Ljubljana studio. The portal launched on 16 June 2021. The reported initial owners’ investment in the project was €1.3 million.

The ownership chain runs through Luxembourg and the Netherlands. At Slovenian registry level, Adria News Production d.o.o. is wholly owned by Adria News S.à r.l. (Luxembourg), the operating umbrella for N1 entities across the region, N1 Serbia, N1 Croatia, N1 BiH and N1 Slovenia, alongside Vijesti TV in Montenegro and a series of Serbian outlets including Nova S, Danas and the Radar weekly. Adria News S.à r.l. is owned by United Media, which sits inside United Group BV (Netherlands). United Group has been majority-owned since March 2019 by BC Partners, a London-based alternative-investment firm with around €40 billion of assets under management. Founder Dragan Šolak retains a minority stake; his management coalition has publicly claimed that the broader group of management-aligned shareholders holds “more than 42%” of the business.

A new editorial-governance overlay was added in February 2026: N1 Slovenia’s current impressum places the outlet within Adria News Network, a governance structure described in detail under Signals below. ANN is an editorial-governance framework rather than a legal ownership transfer at the Slovenian-company level: Adria News Production d.o.o. remains a 100%-owned subsidiary of Adria News S.à r.l. on the Slovenian register.

The director (zastopnik) of Adria News Production d.o.o. is Katja Šeruga, a long-time Slovenian journalist and editor with prior senior roles at the Maribor daily Večer and Pop TV; she joined as the first employee on 15 January 2021, having signed on as the launch editor and director of the new company. N1 Slovenia’s current impressum lists her as news director, with Neda Došenović as web site director. The senior editorial team also includes Suzana Lovec (the Poglobljeno in-depth section), Miha Orešnik (N1 STUDIO), Sarah Neubauer, Meta Roglič, and Martin Pavčnik (Sportklub editorial). N1 Slovenia operates as the regional CNN affiliate alongside its sister N1 stations in Serbia, Croatia and BiH, and reports figures showing it consistently among Slovenia’s top ten most-read news portals (in 2023 the company itself reported more than 600,000 monthly visitors and a sixth-place position in MOSS rankings). As of FY2025, the average headcount on a work-hours basis was 36.4, essentially unchanged from 36.6 in 2024.

Asset map

The company has effectively a single asset visible to the Slovenian public: the n1info.si portal. Behind it sit the Ljubljana studio, the contracted partnership with United Media’s group-wide infrastructure (advertising, technology, sports rights), and the CNN affiliate relationship. There is no print product, no separate paid streaming product, and no foreign-language vertical.

The Slovenian company is structurally separate from another United Media-owned Slovenian entity, Adria Media Ljubljana d.o.o., which is the local publishing house of brands such as Metropolitan, Avto Magazin, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Govori se. United Media filed the 71% takeover with Slovenia’s Competition Protection Agency (AVK) in October 2021, and announced regulatory approval and completion of the takeover on 28 November 2022. The two companies share an ultimate owner, but Adria News Production runs only n1info.si and is not the publisher of those magazine titles.

Signals

Profit fell 90% on essentially flat revenue

Net sales declined by 0.9%. Derived operating profit / EBIT fell 85.2%. Net profit fell 90.0%. The arithmetic that bridges those two collapses is straightforward: the combined costs of goods, materials and services rose by €108,000 (+14.2%), with service costs alone up 15.8%; labour costs rose by €97,000 (+5.6%); total write-downs were €6,000 higher; and other operating expenses fell by €27,000. The net effect was an extra €184,000 of operating costs against €27,000 less revenue, a roughly €211,000 swing in operating result, on a base of €250,000.

The cost lines tell the FY2025 story. Wages and salaries grew 4.1% to €1.41 million, and total labour costs by 5.6% to €1.83 million even though average work-hours-basis headcount was essentially flat at 36.4. Average compensation per FTE rose by about 4.7%, broadly consistent with Slovenian wage inflation in 2025; on a small newsroom, every percentage point on the wage base matters. Service costs alone rose by 15.8% to €833,301; this is the line that would typically capture freelance journalism contributors, technical and editorial subcontracting, agency commissions and intra-group fees for shared infrastructure and technology services from United Media and United Cloud. The filing does not break the line down further.

The headcount and the mix of work has not really changed.

Average employees on a work-hours basis was 36.41 in 2025 and 36.62 in 2024, within the rounding error of the calculation method, and broadly consistent with the team profile that has been visible publicly since N1 Slovenia’s first-anniversary retrospective in 2022 (which described “45 dedicated content creators” if freelance contributors are included). There is no evidence in the filing of either expansion or contraction; what changed in FY2025 was the unit cost of running the operation. Slovenia’s print sector has been visibly under pressure (both Dnevnik and Delo have filed restructuring news in recent years) but a digital-only operation working primarily for an international advertising client base, with no physical-print cost base, has remained roughly steady-state. The cost squeeze in FY2025 is consequently a margin story rather than a structural-distress story.

The ownership turbulence at the parent level is the macro context

The Slovenian company’s filing describes a stable digital newsroom. The parent group’s filings, public statements and regional press coverage describe something else entirely.

In early 2025 United Group sold SBB, its Serbian cable-broadband business, to a consortium of E& (UAE) and PPF Telecom Group (Czech Republic), and at around the same time sold NetTV Plus and the Western Balkans sports rights to state-owned Telekom Srbija. United Group itself stated that the two transactions together represented enterprise value of approximately €1.5 billion; Bloomberg separately reported the SBB component at around €825 million. The transactions were described by BC Partners as substantially completing “the monetisation of telecom assets outside the EU”.

In June 2025 BC Partners removed founder Dragan Šolak as Advisory Board chair and CEO Victoriya Boklag from her role, installing Stan Miller as CEO and Libor Vončina as Deputy CEO. The change was framed as a “strategic refocusing on EU markets”. Šolak publicly disputed the move. In July and August 2025 an internal management revolt emerged: according to Financial Times and Private Equity Wire reporting, eight country-level CEOs and 14 senior executives wrote to the board describing the management change as an “existential threat”. OCCRP then published leaked communications and photos from a meeting in Belgrade between Stan Miller and Vladimir Lučić, CEO of Telekom Srbija; OCCRP and several regional outlets including Vreme reported the conversation as discussing changes that would weaken United Media and N1. Lučić, the Serbian president’s spokesperson, United Group and BC Partners have all denied improper influence or interference in editorial independence. According to OCCRP, United Group has confirmed the authenticity of one recording but said it was incomplete and lacked context; United Group’s own published Q&A says editorial decisions are made by newsrooms, not by group executives, and rejects any agreement with Telekom Srbija to fire staff or affect newsroom matters.

In September 2025, according to Bloomberg and UK court-order reporting, a UK court ordered BC Partners to pay Šolak €250 million, settling Šolak’s London proceedings on disputed bonus claims relating to the asset sales. United Group separately rejected what it called “false and misleading claims” about editorial interference at N1 and Nova in Serbia.

In February 2026, six weeks before the Slovenian FY2025 filing was signed, Adria News S.à r.l. (Luxembourg) launched Adria News Network (ANN), a new governance framework that placed all five-country news operations under a fully independent board with no executives or shareholder representatives from United Group. The Board of Directors is chaired by Rani R. Raad (former President of CNN Commercial Worldwide and CEO of International Media Investments). The Chief News Executive is Brent Sadler, an N1 co-founder and former senior CNN international correspondent. The Editorial Council includes Nigel Baker (chair of the Sky News Board), Dr May Chidiac, and Simon Bucks (UK Ofcom Content Board). The network has been described as covering more than 1,000 journalists and a combined audience of over 16 million across BiH, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

For the Slovenian company, the practical implication is that from early 2026 N1 Slovenia’s editorial governance (newsroom leadership, the editorial charter, accountability for editorial standards) sits with Adria News Network, not with United Group’s commercial management. Whether ANN delivers the editorial protection it has been designed to deliver is a question that will play out over the next several reporting cycles. What can be observed today is that the structure was set up after a year in which the question of editorial independence at United Media-owned outlets was genuinely live, and that the chair and council are people with substantial international media-governance reputations to protect.

The journalism keeps producing recognisable Slovenian work

N1 Slovenia operates in a market where commercial broadcaster Pop TV (Pro Plus, ultimately owned by PPF Group through CME) controls most linear advertising; where the public broadcaster RTV Slovenija remains the dominant news source for a substantial part of the population; where the established print dailies Dnevnik, Delo and Večer continue to circulate with progressively shrinking print runs; and where digital news consumption has migrated to portals such as 24ur.com (Pro Plus), siol.net (Telekom Slovenije), rtvslo.si (public broadcaster), and a handful of smaller independents. n1info.si has positioned itself as an explicitly independent news portal with an international affiliation (CNN), with extended interview programming, in-depth long-form work, and a sports vertical drawing on Sportklub. The trade-off accepted on the cost side in 2025, paying more for the same headcount and the same volume of services, is the price, on these accounts, of maintaining that operation through a year in which the parent group was in significant flux.

What to watch in 2026

Possible ownership-level changes. In April 2026, the Serbian weekly Vreme and the Slovenian daily Dnevnik reported that the Portuguese investment group Alpac Capital, which acquired the Euronews television network in 2022, was in talks to acquire N1 and other United Group media assets, including Slovenian and regional titles. United Group declined to comment on market speculation, while Adria News Network said in a written response to N1’s enquiries that ownership questions are a matter for the shareholders and that ANN is focused on protecting editorial integrity. Dnevnik additionally reported that Alpac Capital is led by Pedro Vargas David, whose father Mario David, a former Portuguese MEP, is described in Slovenian and Serbian press as a longstanding political associate of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán; Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has publicly said he is on friendly terms with Mario David. None of this is a confirmed transaction, but for a company whose ANN governance framework was launched only weeks earlier, the prospect of an ownership change accompanied by reported political adjacencies is the most consequential live item for FY2026.

Whether the cost squeeze of 2025 reverses or persists. The 15.8% jump in service costs and 5.6% jump in labour costs against essentially flat revenue is the central FY2025 financial story. If service costs moderate in 2026, through, for example, renegotiated intra-group service charges following the parent restructuring, derived operating profit could recover quickly without sales growth, given how operationally geared the small entity is. If they do not, the FY2026 result could move from low-profit to loss-making.

The receivables book. Days-sales-outstanding of about 118 at end-2025 (down from 132) is still high. A further reduction in 2026, especially matched by another increase in cash, would suggest the parent restructuring has tightened intra-group payment terms and would strengthen the Slovenian entity’s standalone solvency profile.

The first acts of Adria News Network. The Editorial Council has been tasked with developing an Editorial Charter as one of its first formal acts; once published, that document will become the governing standard against which N1 Slovenia’s editorial decisions will be tested. Slovenian journalism scholarship and groups such as the Slovenian Association of Journalists will read it carefully, particularly in the context of the live Alpac Capital acquisition reporting.

Sources. Primary: Adria News Production d.o.o., balance sheet at 31 December 2025 and income statement for the period 1 January – 31 December 2025, as filed with AJPES. Multi-year financial cross-checks and director/registry information from ebonitete.si, bizi.si and CompanyWall. Corporate history of N1 Slovenia (December 2020 incorporation; 16 June 2021 launch of n1info.si; €1.3 million reported initial investment): Slovenian-language Wikipedia entry on N1 Slovenija, contemporaneous Slovenian press reporting (Marketing Magazin, Govori.se, Metina lista, Regional Obala), and N1 Slovenia’s own first-anniversary retrospective. Director identification (Katja Šeruga as news director, Neda Došenović as web site director) corroborated by N1 Slovenia’s current impressum and ebonitete.si. Ownership chain through Adria News S.à r.l., United Media, United Group BV and BC Partners: Media Ownership Monitor entries on N1 (Serbia, BiH, Montenegro), United Media’s own corporate website, and the English-language Wikipedia entry on United Group. Adria Media Ljubljana takeover (October 2021 AVK filing; November 2022 regulatory approval and completion of the 71% acquisition by United Media): contemporaneous reporting in Marketing Magazin, Broadband TV News and STA. United Group 2025 events: United Group’s own 16 June 2025 PR announcement (combined €1.5 billion enterprise value of asset sales); Bloomberg and e& transaction materials separately for the €825 million SBB component; Financial Times and Private Equity Wire reporting on the management revolt; OCCRP reporting on the leaked Belgrade meeting between Stan Miller and Vladimir Lučić, with the framing that Lučić, the Serbian president’s spokesperson, United Group and BC Partners denied improper influence and that United Group has confirmed authenticity of one recording but said it was incomplete; Bloomberg and UK court-order reporting on the September 2025 €250 million settlement. February 2026 launch of Adria News Network: PR Newswire announcement of 19 February 2026 (Adria News S.à r.l.) and follow-up coverage in Broadband TV News. April 2026 Alpac Capital reporting: Vreme (Serbian weekly), Dnevnik (Slovenian daily), Telecompaper, and N1’s own follow-up on United Group’s no-comment response and ANN’s written response that ownership questions are for shareholders. Slovenian media market context: AJPES sectoral statistics, contemporaneous Slovenian press reporting, and prior GMFM coverage of the Slovenian print dailies Dnevnik and Delo. All figures in euro at the filed reporting amount; figures in the body have been rounded to the nearest euro for readability.