Delfi Latvia

Delfi AS, the Latvian operating arm of the Tallinn-listed Ekspress Grupp, reported a sharp jump in net profit for 2025, from €0.59 million to €1.78 million. Almost all of that increase came from a single transaction: the sale, in August 2025, of Delfi’s 25.48% stake in a Latvian fintech called SIA Altero. The buyer was a company indirectly controlled by Ekspress Grupp’s own majority shareholder, Hans Luik. Without that gain, Delfi’s Latvian publishing business made another small operating loss, on a 5% drop in revenue and a continuing weak advertising market.

What the headline really shows is a company whose journalism does not, on its own, make money, and whose 2025 profit was carried by a related-party deal upstairs.

Delfi AS Latvia: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: Delfi AS annual report for the year ended 31 December 2025, filed 22 April 2026. Audited by SIA Potapoviča un Andersone (Riga). Currency: EUR.

Delfi AS is the wholly owned Latvian subsidiary of AS Ekspress Grupp, the Estonian media group whose 2025 results we reviewed in March 2026 and which is now controlled to the level of 96.12% by Hans Luik through his holding company HHL Rühm. Beyond the Delfi.lv news portal itself, Delfi AS owns two profitable non-journalism businesses: SIA Biļešu paradīze, a leading Baltic ticket-sales platform, and SIA D Screens, a digital out-of-home advertising network.

Delfi AS Latvia: asset map

Signals

The €1.78 million profit was made upstairs, not in the newsroom

The journalism business itself lost money in 2025. Delfi’s news operation generated €5.25 million of revenue and around €0.69 million of operating losses, an improvement on 2024 (–€0.87m) thanks to about €0.36 million of cost cuts in selling and administration, but still a loss. What got the company to a positive bottom line was a single transaction: the sale of its 25.48% stake in SIA Altero, a Baltic financial-products comparison platform, for €4.2 million in cash. The buyer was OÜ Aktiva Finance Group, a company indirectly controlled by Hans Luik, Ekspress Grupp’s majority shareholder. Two members of Ekspress Grupp’s supervisory board declared conflicts of interest because they sit on the boards of the buyer; an Ernst & Young fairness opinion was used to set the price. The deal generated roughly €2.2 million of book gain, which is essentially the whole of Delfi’s 2025 net profit.

Ekspress Grupp also carried out a separate, larger and unrelated divestment in 2025, the forced sale of UAB Lrytas, a Lithuanian news portal, on 29 December 2025, after a Lithuanian Competition Council ruling. That transaction was executed at group level in Tallinn and generated a one-off net loss for the consolidated group.

The publishing business is shrinking, but more readers are paying

Net turnover at Delfi AS fell 5% to €5.25 million in 2025, in line with what every advertising-supported news operation in the Baltic states experienced this year: a slowing economy, advertisers pulling back, and weak consumer confidence. At consolidated level, Ekspress Grupp’s advertising revenue fell 7% over the year and 13% in the fourth quarter alone.

The bright spot is paid digital subscriptions. Ekspress Grupp reported that Delfi.lv’s digital subscribers grew 14% in 2025 to 40,090, the strongest growth rate among the three Delfi country markets, ahead of Lithuania (12%) and Estonia. But the growth in subscriber numbers did not yet translate into higher subscription revenue at Delfi AS itself, where content-subscription income actually slipped slightly year-on-year (from €0.74 million to €0.72 million). More people are paying, but average revenue per subscriber is being eroded, by promotional pricing, by churn, or by both.

The profitable parts of the Latvian business are not the journalism

Inside the Latvian perimeter, the audited subsidiary numbers show clearly which business lines actually make money. Biļešu paradīze, the ticket-sales platform, posted net profit of €1.85 million on equity of €6.92 million, more than the entire net profit of Delfi AS at parent level after the Altero gain. D Screens, the outdoor digital screen network, made a smaller profit of €34,691 on equity of €384,028. The Latvian publishing business itself, on a standalone basis, runs at a small operating loss that is offset only by intra-group dividends or one-off gains.

This is the same pattern Ekspress Grupp’s commentary describes at consolidated level: increasingly, profitability at the group is coming from conferences, ticketing, and outdoor screens, not from journalism. In Latvia, the same shape is visible in a single subsidiary’s books.

The company depends on intra-group lending to stay solvent on paper

At the end of 2025, Delfi AS’s short-term liabilities exceeded its current assets by about €2.74 million, meaning that, on a strict reading of the balance sheet, the company would not be able to cover its near-term obligations from cash and other current assets alone. The bulk of those short-term liabilities, €3.12 million, is owed to other companies inside Ekspress Grupp, including a €2.5 million loan from one of Delfi’s own subsidiaries.

Management states that it is confident those related parties will not call in their loans in a way that endangers liquidity, and the auditor did not flag the situation as a material uncertainty. This is not a crisis; it is a structural feature of how a wholly owned subsidiary inside a single-controlled group is financed. But it does mean Delfi AS, on a standalone basis, is solvent because its parent and its own subsidiaries choose not to call their loans, not because the underlying business generates enough cash to cover its liabilities.

A dividend went up to Tallinn for the first time in years, at a notable moment

For the first time in the period covered by these accounts, Delfi AS paid a cash dividend in 2025: €800,000 to its sole shareholder, AS Ekspress Grupp. (The accounts also record a larger €1.47 million distribution charged against retained earnings; the difference of €0.67 million has not been paid in cash and likely sits as an intra-group balance.)

The timing matters. The dividend was paid in the same year Delfi AS realised €4.2 million in cash from the Altero sale, and in the same year Hans Luik launched a voluntary takeover bid for the remaining minority of Ekspress Grupp at €1.25 per share, a bid that closed in late 2025 and brought his holding to 96.12%. There is nothing inherently unusual about a wholly owned subsidiary distributing cash to its parent after a one-off realisation. But it does mean a portion of the proceeds from a related-party sale to the controlling shareholder’s vehicle ended up flowing back up to the parent group at a moment when its own controlling shareholder was taking it more closely private.

Leadership has turned over at the top of the Latvian business

Delfi AS started 2025 with a new chief executive. Jānis Grīviņš was appointed chairman of the management board with effect from 2 January 2025, succeeding Konstantīns Kuzikovs, who had stepped down in late August 2024 after more than a decade in the role. The board now consists of three members: Grīviņš as chairman; Maira Meija, head of business development and subscriptions; and Filips Lastovskis, who as editor-in-chief of delfi.lv since October 2022 represents the editorial function. Lastovskis succeeded Ingus Bērziņš, one of the longest-tenured editorial figures in the Latvian online news sector, who edited delfi.lv from 2001 to 2022.

The supervisory board was also remade in December 2025, after Mari-Liis Rüütsalu’s term as Ekspress Grupp CEO ended. From the start of 2026 the supervisory board of A/S Delfi consists of Liina Liiv (Ekspress Grupp’s new chief executive) as chair, Karl Anton, and Rain Sarapuu, three people who are simultaneously the entire management board of Ekspress Grupp itself.

The headcount at Delfi Latvia has also fallen sharply. Average employees dropped from 115 in 2024 to 93 in 2025, a 19% reduction in a single year, consistent with the cost-cutting visible in the income statement.

What to watch in 2026

The unanswered question for 2026 is whether Delfi AS’s Latvian publishing business can stand on its own. Subscription growth at 14% is the right direction, but it is not yet large enough to offset a 5% advertising decline, and the 2025 profit was made by selling an asset, not by running a newspaper. Without another disposal, Delfi AS will need either to grow paid subscriptions faster than advertising falls, or to keep relying on intra-group dividends and loans from its parent and its own subsidiaries. The two profitable parts of the Latvian perimeter, ticketing and outdoor screens, are doing the heavy lifting; the journalism, on the basis of its own audited numbers, is not.

What the Hans Luik takeover at parent level means for Delfi.lv specifically, more editorial autonomy, more centralisation in Tallinn, or no visible change at all, will become clearer over the course of 2026.