News and Media Holding

News and Media Holding a.s. (NMH), one of Slovakia’s largest publishing houses and, by its owner Penta’s own description, the leader in Slovak online and print media, is the company behind the best-selling weekly Plus 7 dní, the tabloid daily Plus jeden deň and the economic weekly Trend. It reported net turnover of €41.77 million for 2025, down 3.8% on 2024. Net profit for the year more than doubled, rising 114% to €2.46 million, from €1.15 million in 2024. That improvement, however, did not come from publishing more or selling more advertising, both of which were broadly flat to slightly down; it came almost entirely from the financial line, where the company’s interest costs roughly halved as it repaid and refinanced expensive debt. Average headcount fell to 260 from 276. This is a profit recovery driven by deleveraging, not by a stronger media business.

The shape of the year is clearest in two numbers. NMH’s operating performance was essentially stable: turnover slipped from €43.41 million to €41.77 million, and the operating side of the business changed little. But the result from financial activity improved from −€4.68 million to −€2.23 million, a swing of nearly €2.45 million, as interest expense dropped from €4.95 million to €2.48 million. That is the entire profit story. NMH is a large, advertising-and-print-heavy group owned by the financial investor Penta, and in 2025 the dominant influence on its bottom line was the cost of money, not the state of the Slovak media market.

News and Media Holding: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: News and Media Holding a.s., audited single-entity financial statements (notes) for the year ended 31 December 2025, IČO 47256281, registered office Einsteinova 25, Bratislava; auditor CLA Slovakia s.r.o. (unqualified opinion, going-concern basis). Multi-year turnover and profit figures are taken from the company’s filed profit-and-loss statements for 2020–2025. NMH also prepares consolidated group accounts, which are filed separately; the figures here are the parent-company accounts. Currency: EUR.

News and Media Holding was created in 2014–2015 when the financial group Penta Investments entered the Slovak media market, acquiring the publishers 7 Plus (home of Plus 7 dní and Plus jeden deň), Trend Holding (the economic weekly Trend) and Centrum Holdings, and merging them into a single company. The legal entity is the successor to those firms plus several others absorbed since, including Život Publishing in 2019 and, most recently, FPD Media, whose 2024 merger is visible in these accounts as a fresh tranche of goodwill (see below). NMH is held, through MEDIA SK Holdings Limited of Cyprus, by Penta, the diversified investment group whose interests span healthcare, retail, real estate and finance and whose co-owner Jaroslav Haščák was arrested in December 2020 on suspicion of corruption, charges later dropped. Over the past decade Penta has become a dominant force in Slovak publishing. It once also co-owned Petit Press (publisher of the daily SME), but exited that holding in 2021, selling its 34% stake to the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) and a remaining 5.5% to Petit Press’s managers. Its principal media vehicle today is NMH, and in October 2023 NMH acquired the tabloid daily Nový Čas and the cas.sk portal from FPD Media, the company of businessman Anton Siekel, after the title had previously passed out of Ringier Axel Springer’s portfolio in 2018. The deal gave the Penta stable Slovakia’s two biggest tabloids; the related Nový Čas Nedeľa weekly stayed with FPD Media, which also took an option on a minority stake in NMH. That acquisition is the FPD Media merger recorded in these accounts.

By turnover and headcount NMH is among the country’s largest publishers, selling, by the group’s own account, more than two million print copies a month and reaching over three million online readers. Its portfolio is broad and heavily commercial, tabloid- and lifestyle-oriented, although Penta’s ownership means NMH sits inside Slovakia’s politically exposed media-ownership structure: it is not editorially neutral in the wider sense, and Denník N has reported that the group’s titles, especially the free, million-circulation fortnightly Plus 1 Deň Špeciál, gave favourable and often uncritical space to the Hlas and Smer parties ahead of the 2023 election, a campaign in which NMH booked record election-advertising revenue of €685,000. The main brands are the mass-market weekly Plus 7 dní, the tabloid daily Plus jeden deň, lifestyle and hobby magazines such as Život, Zdravie and Emma, and the economic weekly Trend, which is the group’s most journalistically serious title. The 2025 revenue split underlines the business model: of €41.77 million in turnover, periodicals brought in €20.20 million and advertising services €19.40 million, an almost even balance between circulation and ad sales, with roughly €36.12 million earned in Slovakia and a further €4.20 million in the Czech and Irish markets.

Signals

The profit doubled because the interest bill halved

The defining feature of the 2025 accounts is that almost the entire improvement in net profit came from below the operating line. Net turnover actually fell 3.8%, and the operating business was roughly flat. What changed was financing cost: interest expense fell from €4.95 million to €2.48 million, of which interest paid to related parties dropped from €3.67 million to €1.47 million. The result from financial activity improved by nearly €2.45 million, and pre-tax profit rose from €3.15 million to €3.95 million on that basis alone. This is the financial signature of a leveraged-buyout-style ownership structure working through a cheaper-debt year: the publishing operation did not get materially stronger in 2025, but the cost of carrying the group’s debt did get lighter.

Penta has been steadily unwinding the parent loan

The balance sheet shows the mechanism. The large shareholder loan from the Cyprus parent, MEDIA SK Holdings, fell from €28.29 million to €16.58 million during 2025, continuing a sharp reduction (it stood near €69 million when first advanced in 2023), while bank borrowing rose more modestly, from €22.45 million to €26.32 million. In other words, NMH has been replacing expensive intra-group debt with cheaper bank financing and repaying principal, which is exactly what drove the interest bill down. The trade-off is that the company is now more exposed to commercial banks and to interest-rate movements, and its bank loans are secured on its own shares, its stakes in subsidiaries and its assets. Equity, helped by the retained profit, edged up to €43.32 million.

The balance sheet is dominated by goodwill and trademarks, not hard assets

NMH’s assets are overwhelmingly intangible, a legacy of the mergers that created it. Goodwill arising from the 2014 consolidation and the later FPD Media combination still carries a net book value of around €65 million and is being amortised (a charge of roughly €2.1 million in 2025), while the group’s mastheads and titles, recorded as “valuation rights” (oceniteľné práva), are worth a further €19.6 million net after impairment provisions. Tangible fixed assets, by contrast, are tiny, around €1.1 million. This is normal for a roll-up publisher, but it means the equity cushion sits on top of intangible values that depend on the continued earning power of the titles; the trademarks are also pledged to a bank. A future impairment of goodwill or titles, rather than any operating loss, would be the most likely source of a sudden equity hit.

A print-and-advertising business in slow structural decline

Stripped of the financing effects, the underlying trend is the familiar one for a legacy print group. Turnover has been volatile but is not growing in real terms, periodical and advertising revenues are roughly flat to declining, and headcount has fallen again, to an average of 260 from 276, with 255 staff at year-end. The group leans on tabloid and lifestyle circulation plus advertising sales rather than on paid digital news, and its most serious journalistic title, Trend, sits inside a portfolio whose centre of gravity is mass-market and commercial. The notes to the accounts disclose personality-rights and other lawsuits against the company totalling €5.58 million in claimed sums, against which it holds a €1.99 million provision, a reminder that the tabloid side of the business carries its own recurring legal-risk cost.

What to watch in 2026

NMH’s 2025 result should be read for what it is: a financing-driven profit recovery at a stable-to-declining publishing business, inside a group that its private-equity owner is steadily deleveraging. The questions for the year ahead fall into three areas.

First, the financing trajectory. If Penta continues to repay the parent loan and refinance through banks, the interest bill, and therefore reported profit, will keep depending heavily on rates and on the terms of secured bank debt rather than on publishing performance. A turn in interest rates would flow straight to the bottom line. Second, the underlying media business: whether NMH can stabilise circulation and advertising revenue, or whether the slow erosion of print and the shift of advertising to global platforms continues to grind down the operating base that the financing engineering currently flatters.

Third, and most distinctive to Slovakia, the political environment. Since Robert Fico’s return to power in October 2023, press-freedom monitors including the Media Freedom Rapid Response partners, RSF and the European Federation of Journalists have documented a sharply more hostile climate for journalism: the replacement of the public broadcaster RTVS with a politically supervised entity (STVR), threats to withdraw state advertising from critical outlets, a restructuring of the media regulator, and SLAPP-style lawsuits against journalists. NMH is not an opposition newsroom and is less directly in the government’s sights than investigative or public-service media, but it operates in the same shrinking, polarised, advertising-dependent market, and its owner Penta is itself a politically exposed conglomerate. The 2025 filing shows a company whose finances are being managed competently from the top down. What it cannot show is whether the journalism inside one of Slovakia’s largest publishers can thrive, rather than merely persist, in an information market under sustained political pressure.