Daily Mail and General Trust

Daily Mail and General Trust plc (DMGT) is the privately-held UK media group behind the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, Metro, The i Paper and the science weekly New Scientist. It also runs dmg events, the exhibitions business behind ADIPEC (the world’s largest energy show, on the company’s own description), and owns the UK property-information business Landmark and (until completion of a deal announced in April 2026) the US commercial-real-estate data provider Trepp. The whole company is controlled, through a Jersey discretionary trust, by Jonathan Harmsworth, the 4th Viscount Rothermere.

For the financial year ended 30 September 2025, DMGT reported revenue of £1,092m (about US$1.42bn), down 1% from £1,105m. Adjusted operating profit grew 11% to £97m (~US$126m), lifting the operating margin from 8% to 9%. (Adjusted operating profit is the company’s preferred profit measure: profit before exceptional costs, impairments and the amortisation of intangibles arising on past acquisitions.) Statutory operating profit, the figure under standard accounting rules, moved from a £23m loss in FY2024 to a £24m profit in FY2025. But after a £83m statutory tax charge (versus a £55m tax credit a year earlier), the company recorded a statutory loss after tax of £49m (~−US$64m), against a £62m statutory profit a year earlier.

Three things made the year strategically unusual. First, on 23 October 2025, after the year-end, DMGT moved its US, Australian and parts of its Irish operations into a new Jersey-incorporated parent company, Rothermere Continuation Holdings Limited (RCHL), in exchange for £913m. Second, on 22 November 2025, DMGT signed an agreement to buy Telegraph Media Group at a £500m valuation, a deal that the UK government referred to the Competition and Markets Authority and Ofcom for review on competition and media-plurality grounds. That deal was later overtaken: in March 2026 RedBird IMI, the Telegraph‘s owner, said it would sell the title to Axel Springer instead, at a higher £575m valuation. The UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy gave that deal her consent on 14 April 2026. So as of mid-2026, DMGT is not buying the Telegraph. Third, on 30 April 2026, RCHL announced an agreement to sell Trepp to Fitch Group for approximately US$1bn (~£769m) in cash, expected to complete during the second quarter of 2026.

Key indicators (FY2025)

Source: Daily Mail and General Trust plc Annual Report and Consolidated Financial Statements for the year ended 30 September 2025, audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. USD equivalents at an indicative rate of £1 = US$1.30, broadly consistent with GBP/USD averages over the reporting period.

Ownership and corporate history

The Rothermere family has owned and run the Daily Mail since the year of its founding. Harold Harmsworth, made the 1st Viscount Rothermere in July 1919, and his elder brother Alfred launched the mid-market national newspaper in 1896. The business was incorporated as a public company in 1922 and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1932. The 4th Viscount Rothermere, Jonathan Harmsworth, born 1967, became chairman in September 1998 on the death of his father.

Through the family’s Jersey holding company Rothermere Continuation Limited (RCL), controlled by a discretionary trust held for the benefit of Viscount Rothermere and his immediate family, he had increased his voting interest in DMGT from 59.9% to 89.2% by July 2013. In late 2021 he led a take-private of the public stock. The transaction was conditional on the sale of DMGT’s insurance-risk business RMS to Moody’s for £1.4bn (completed September 2021) and on the New York listing of online-car-retailer Cazoo, in which DMGT held a 20% stake (which floated August 2021). RCL paid 270p per share, valuing the equity it did not already own at about £871m. DMGT delisted from the London Stock Exchange on 10 January 2022. RCL has owned 100% of both DMGT’s voting Ordinary Shares and the non-voting A Shares ever since. DMGT’s £148m of 6.375% bonds due June 2027 remain listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The chairman is The Viscount Rothermere, who serves as Executive Chairman. The chief executive, appointed in March 2023, is Tim Collier, who previously served as DMGT’s chief financial officer from 2017 until December 2021 (he was instrumental in the strategic decisions that led to the company going private in 2021) and was a non-executive director and special adviser at the time of his CEO appointment. Before joining DMGT, Collier was chief financial officer at the Thomson Reuters Financial and Risk business. The other directors listed in the FY25 Companies Information section are KJ Beatty, D Hopfen, AH Lane, DH Nelson, K AH Parry OBE, JP Rangaswami, Sir William G Touche Bt., and F Wallestam. The annual report notes that two non-executive directors, Lane and Nelson, are advisers to RCL rather than independent directors. The Company Secretary is F L Sallas. The registered office is Northcliffe House, 9 Derry Street, London W8 5HY.

Asset map

DMGT operates through three reporting segments (Consumer Media, Property Information, and Events & Exhibitions) plus a small minority-investments arm, dmg ventures.

For journalism specifically, the most editorially significant assets are: the Daily Mail itself, the cash engine of the wider group and one of the two largest-selling UK national daily newspapers; MailOnline / dailymail.com, repeatedly cited in industry reporting as among the most-visited English-language news websites in the world (the FY25 annual report records that website traffic was “adversely affected by the introduction of AI overviews by search engine providers, resulting in fewer users clicking through to news websites”); The Mail on Sunday, the sister Sunday title; The i Paper, a politically non-partisan low-priced quality daily originally founded as the morning compact spin-off of The Independent in 2010, the most distinctive editorial asset DMGT has acquired in the past decade, and one whose editorial independence the company has consistently committed to maintain; Metro, the country’s largest free daily, distributed every weekday morning across UK transport hubs; and New Scientist, the weekly science magazine acquired in 2021.

DMGT is moving out of direct newspaper printing. The Dinnington and Thurrock plants closed in April–May 2024 and were decommissioned during FY25; the Carn plant in Northern Ireland was reported as in the process of being closed at the time the annual report was signed.

Signals

The reported numbers are dominated by tax. The operating story is a 9% margin from cost discipline, not from revenue growth.

Group revenue fell 1% (from £1,105m to £1,092m). Strip out the Property Information impairment and exceptional items, and adjusted operating profit grew 11% to £97m. But the route there was almost entirely cost-side: Consumer Media revenue fell 2%; Events revenue fell 5%; only Property Information grew (+7%). The statutory loss after tax of £49m versus a £62m profit in FY24 is a £111m year-on-year swing, but it is almost entirely a tax story (a £83m statutory tax charge in FY25 against a £55m statutory tax credit in FY24, a £138m swing). The operating business is doing better than the headline statutory loss suggests; the adjusted-profit narrative omits the genuine cash cost of the £38m of exceptional operating costs and the £27m Landmark goodwill impairment.

The adjusted-profit improvement came from several places, not one.

Of the £10m year-on-year rise in group adjusted operating profit (from £87m to £97m), Consumer Media contributed +£3m (lower print costs after the Dinnington and Thurrock closures), Property Information contributed +£5m (revenue growth and margin gain at Landmark and Trepp), and Events contributed +£3m (margin gain on the core owned-events portfolio). Corporate costs rose by about £1m. So the year was a multi-segment story rather than driven by any one division.

The print-to-digital migration story is now a print-to-Newsprinters story.

Consumer Media circulation revenue of £239m, about 40% of segment revenue, fell only 1% year-on-year, even as paid-for newspaper volumes continued to decline, because of cover-price increases. Print advertising revenue of £103m fell 3%, described in the company’s annual report as “a relatively resilient performance given the decline in circulation volumes.” But digital advertising revenue also fell, and the reason given is the most editorially interesting line in the entire annual report: “website traffic being adversely affected by the introduction of AI overviews by search engine providers, resulting in fewer users clicking through to news websites.” The proposed mitigation is subscriptions: in July 2025, dmg media announced a target of “trebling the number of digital subscribers to its Daily Mail products to one million by October 2028.” The cost-side of the migration is the £56m adjusted operating profit at the Consumer Media segment, up 5% year-on-year, achieved through the plant closures and the transfer of production to the 50%-owned Newsprinters joint venture.

The Telegraph deal was real, and it was overtaken.

This was the dominant strategic story of late 2025 and early 2026, and its conclusion is the dominant story of the FY26 trading year. On 22 November 2025, DMGT signed an agreement with RedBird IMI to acquire Telegraph Media Group at a £500m valuation. Pending regulatory clearance, the deal would have added the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph to a stable that already includes the Mail titles, Metro, The i Paper and New Scientist. UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy issued a Public Interest Intervention Notice on 12 February 2026, sending the deal to the Competition and Markets Authority and Ofcom for parallel assessments on competition and on media plurality, with reports due by 10 June 2026. The government’s published case papers stated that DMGT already accounts for about 50.6% of UK national daily newspaper circulation; had the Telegraph acquisition proceeded, that share would have risen to about 56.1%.

The deal did not proceed as planned. In March 2026 RedBird IMI confirmed that the existing DMGT route was no longer in prospect and that it intended to sell to Axel Springer, the German publisher of Bild, Die Welt, Politico and Business Insider, instead. Axel Springer agreed to pay £575m in cash, slightly above DMGT’s earlier £500m valuation. On 14 April 2026, Lisa Nandy gave written consent to the Axel Springer route and confirmed that she was “not minded to intervene” on competition or foreign-state-influence grounds. Axel Springer expects the transaction to close in the second quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals in Ireland and Austria. So as of mid-2026, DMGT is not buying the Telegraph. The press-gazette description of why the slower regulatory process around DMGT’s deal helped clear the path for Axel Springer is editorially significant: a longer competition and plurality investigation that would have been triggered by the DMGT deal was, from RedBird IMI’s perspective, the practical reason for switching to a buyer with a smaller existing UK newspaper footprint.

UK news-trust context: legacy newspaper brands continue to lose ground.

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025, fielded as a YouGov survey of around 97,000 online news consumers across 48 markets, places UK overall trust in news at 35%, down 16 percentage points since 2015 and one of the largest declines among the developed-economy markets the report tracks. The 2025 report notes that an “accelerating shift towards consumption via social media and video platforms is further diminishing the influence of ‘institutional journalism’ and supercharging a fragmented alternative media environment containing an array of podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers.” The UK is also one of the markets where AI-search summaries are most actively reducing referral traffic to news websites, a finding consistent with DMGT’s own annual-report disclosure on the impact of AI overviews on Mail Online traffic. None of this is specific to DMGT, but the structural backdrop matters: legacy print-and-website monetisation is under structural pressure; the digital subscription path that dmg media has set out (one million Daily Mail subscribers by October 2028) is the company’s own response.

What to watch in 2026

Completion of Axel Springer’s acquisition of Telegraph Media Group. Subject to regulatory clearance in Ireland and Austria, completion is expected in Q2 2026. For DMGT, the relevant follow-on question is whether dmg media announces any consumer-media transaction or strategic partnership now that the Telegraph path is closed.

The first DMGT plc results to reflect the smaller post-reorganisation footprint. FY26 revenue will fall by approximately £336m and adjusted operating profit by approximately £32m as the transferred US, Australian and partly Irish businesses move out of DMGT plc consolidation. The headline year-on-year comparison in the FY26 annual report will require careful unpicking; bondholders and the public reader of the Companies House file will need to track both DMGT plc and any voluntarily-published RCHL group disclosure.

The MailOnline subscriber trajectory. dmg media’s stated target of one million Daily Mail digital subscribers by October 2028 is a public commitment. The company has not separately disclosed the current base. Whether the trajectory holds will be the most direct test of whether the AI-overviews disruption is being offset by paid-subscription growth.

Sources. Primary: Daily Mail and General Trust plc, Annual Report and Consolidated Financial Statements for the year ended 30 September 2025, audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, registration number 184594, filed at Companies House. Note 35 (Post balance sheet events) of the Notes to the Financial Statements records both the 23–28 October 2025 RCHL reorganisation and the 22 November 2025 agreement to acquire Telegraph Media Group. The Consolidated Income Statement and the strategic-report segment tables provide the Consumer Media, Property Information and Events & Exhibitions splits cited in this profile. UK government and regulatory: Department for Culture, Media and Sport Public Interest Intervention Notice of 12 February 2026 (Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State); CMA and Ofcom merger update of 13 February 2026; Lisa Nandy’s written consent to Axel Springer’s acquisition of Telegraph Media Group, 14 April 2026 (reported by Press Gazette, RTÉ, the BBC, Euronews, and others). Telegraph deal valuations and outcome: Reuters reporting of 12 February 2026; AFP / BSS reporting of 22 November 2025; Press Gazette reporting on UK newspaper-circulation share and on the April 2026 Axel Springer outcome. RCHL announcement of agreement to sell Trepp to Fitch Group, 30 April 2026, for approximately US$1bn cash, expected to complete in Q2 2026 subject to US Hart-Scott-Rodino clearance (Baker McKenzie newsroom; DMGT/RCHL announcement filed via the regulatory news service used for the listed bonds; Business Wire, Yahoo Finance, Press Gazette). 2021 take-private context: Press Gazette (Lord Rothermere succeeds in taking DMGT private), Printweek and CNN Business reporting of December 2021. Tim Collier’s appointment as DMGT CEO from March 2023, with Lord Rothermere remaining as Executive Chairman: Press Gazette (14 March 2023), The Media Leader (March 2023). The iacquisition (£49.6m, November 2019): DMGT regulatory announcement of 29 November 2019 and Ofcom public-interest report (September 2022). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 — fourteenth annual edition, fielded by YouGov across 48 markets: reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025. GBP/USD conversions are at an indicative £1 = US$1.30, broadly consistent with calendar-year averages of 1.28 (2024) and 1.32 (2025); the financial year covered here (1 October 2024 – 30 September 2025) sits between the two. The directors of DMGT plc are listed in the FY25 Companies Information section: The Viscount Rothermere (Executive Chairman), KJ Beatty, T G Collier (CEO since March 2023), D Hopfen, AH Lane, DH Nelson, K AH Parry OBE, JP Rangaswami, Sir William G Touche Bt., F Wallestam; Company Secretary F L Sallas. Registered office: Northcliffe House, 9 Derry Street, London W8 5HY, England.