Digi Communications

Digi Communications is formally a telecoms group, but in Romania it is also one of the country’s most consequential media owners. Through Digi Romania it combines dominant fixed-broadband and pay-TV distribution, a major 24-hour news channel, one of the country’s highest-traffic general-news websites, four national radio brands, and a premium sports-channel portfolio. In 2025 the group reported €2.22 billion of revenue and more than 32 million revenue-generating units across Romania, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Belgium. It also reported a net loss of €76.8 million after a €421.8 million profit in 2024, reflecting the absence of the prior-year Spanish fibre-disposal gain and the cost of a very heavy European network build. From a media-ownership perspective, the key fact is not the loss itself. It is that Digi’s Romanian journalism sits inside a founder-controlled telecom platform whose distribution power is now significant enough to trigger renewed fixed-access regulation under EU competition law.

Digi Communications: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: Digi Communications N.V., Annual Report for the year ended 31 December 2025, dated 30 April 2026 and filed with the Bucharest Stock Exchange. Reporting currency: EUR. All revenue figures are consolidated group figures.

Digi Communications N.V. is a Dutch-incorporated holding company whose Class B shares are listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange under the ticker DIGI. The operating company in Romania is Digi Romania S.A. (formerly known as RCS & RDS), the company that built Romania’s largest fibre-optic network from scratch starting in the 1990s. The whole group is controlled by Romanian businessman Zoltán Teszári, who founded the predecessor company in Brașov in 1996 and who today holds 60.1% of the economic interest and approximately 91% of the voting rights in the listed company through his ownership of RCS Management S.A., plus another 2.4% economic / 3.6% voting interest held directly. Teszári is famously reclusive: he lives in Oradea, rarely appears in public, and according to Romania Insider, “many of his employees don’t know what he looks like.” The free float on the Bucharest Stock Exchange (the Class B shares) accounts for about 35% of the company’s economic value, but only about 6% of its voting rights, because the Class A shares Teszári controls carry ten votes each.

Digi Communications: media and journalism asset map

Signals

Digi24 is one of Romania’s four major news channels, and one of the most politically contested

To understand what Digi24 is, you need to understand the Romanian television news market. There are four major 24-hour news channels: Antena 3 CNN (owned by the Voiculescu family group, traditionally associated with the Social Democrats), România TV (also broadly aligned with the Social Democrats), Realitatea Plus (which in 2024–2025 openly supported far-right candidate Călin Georgescu), and Digi24 (broadly seen as pro-Western, pro-EU, and pro-NATO). In a country where the line between TV stations and political parties has historically been visible to anyone watching the screen, Digi24’s positioning has made it both a target and a beneficiary.

In full-year 2024 Kantar audience data reported by Forbes Romania, Digi24 ranked fourth among Romanian news channels by average minute audience, behind România TV, Antena 3 CNN and Realitatea Plus, averaging 58,238 viewers per minute, down from 60,804 in 2023. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 finds that 29% of Romanian respondents use Digi24 weekly, well behind ProTV (the country’s most-watched general-entertainment channel, at 54%) and Antena 1 (34%) but among the strongest dedicated news brands. The website digi24.ro has overtaken almost everyone else online: Digi24 itself, citing data from Romania’s BRAT audience-measurement body, said digi24.ro was the most-visited Romanian site by visits in April 2025, with 41.4 million visits. In Similarweb’s category rankings for early 2026, digi24.ro sits among the top three Romanian news and media publishers, alongside Yahoo and HotNews. By any measure, the digital arm now reaches far more people than the linear television channel it grew out of.

That position has come with editorial controversy. In June 2022 Digi24 ended its long-running collaboration with Cristian Tudor Popescu, one of Romania’s best-known commentators, after his Friday-evening show Cap Limpede criticised proposed changes to Romania’s national-security legislation that would have expanded the powers of the SRI domestic-intelligence service, and after he criticised a Digi24 anchor on air for presenting a 14-year-old video clip as current footage from the war in Ukraine. The channel’s management told Popescu, by phone, that they had decided to end the collaboration based on the content of that final episode. Popescu’s own framing on Facebook was sharper: “The diagnoses delivered in the final Cap Limpede were considered more harmful to the channel’s image than the disease.” The episode, reported in detail at the time by Paginademedia, HotNews, G4Media and Spotmedia, remains one of the clearest public examples of editorial tension around Digi24’s handling of national-security and pro-Western political themes.

The bigger pressure point: 2024 was the year a Romanian election was cancelled

The single most important piece of context for any Romanian news organisation right now is that in November and December 2024, the country’s presidential election was annulled by the Constitutional Court, a decision unprecedented in EU history, after intelligence services and investigative journalists documented a TikTok-led disinformation campaign that lifted previously little-known far-right candidate Călin Georgescu to a first-round victory with 22.9% of the vote. The court found that a sophisticated social-media campaign, partly tied to Russian-affiliated networks and a Romanian businessman who paid TikTok influencers €1 million, had prevented a free vote. Electoral authorities then disqualified Georgescu from the re-run. The new election in May 2025 was won by pro-Western Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan over Georgescu’s protégé George Simion.

This matters for Digi for two reasons. First, Georgescu’s far-right movement, including the AUR party, accused Digi24 of bias during the 2024 campaign for amplifying intelligence-service reports on Russian interference and for treating Georgescu’s positions as fringe. The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Romania chapter (authored by University of Bucharest professor Raluca-Nicoleta Radu) flags that “many [Romanian] brands faced a sharp decrease in trust in the last year, perhaps linked to a strong campaign against mainstream newsrooms from far-right leaders.” Trust in news in Romania overall is now 26%: Romania ranks 44th out of 48 surveyed countries on that measure. Realitatea Plus, which took the opposite editorial stance and endorsed Georgescu, was fined repeatedly by the regulator and saw advertisers withdraw, but its trust score among its own audience remained stable. The Romanian news market is now sharply ideologically segmented in a way it had not been since the early 2000s.

Second, the same Reuters Institute report documents something more uncomfortable for the entire Romanian commercial-media sector, Digi24 included: political parties and candidates spent at least €150 million of public funds on “communication campaigns” in 2023–2024, according to research by Expert Forum and Snoop. NGOs ActiveWatch and Snoop revealed that Romanian TV stations charged candidates up to €200,000 each for paid programmes labelled as electoral content but produced by the stations’ own journalists, which the National Audiovisual Council allowed. The annual filings of Digi do not break out how much state advertising revenue flows into the group, but in a market structured this way, no major commercial newsroom in Romania is fully insulated from those incentives.

The newsroom sits inside one of Europe’s most aggressive infrastructure builds

The economics of Digi’s journalism cannot be separated from the economics of Digi as a whole. The group is in the middle of one of the most aggressive multi-country infrastructure builds in European telecoms, laying fibre in five countries simultaneously and rolling out a full-network mobile operator in Spain (where it had previously rented network capacity from Telefónica), and it is financing that build through cash flow and rising debt. Net debt to EBITDA rose from 2.38× to 3.19× in a single year. Capital expenditure equalled 36% of revenues. Spain is now the main growth engine and is close to Romania in several operating metrics, especially mobile (7.3 million Spanish mobile RGUs against 7.9 million in Romania), but Romania remains the larger revenue market and the group’s higher-margin core.

The Romanian newsroom is, in that broader picture, a small line item attached to a fast-growing pan-European telecom, and that has direct consequences for editorial economics. The newsroom does not need to make money on its own to justify its existence; it serves the bundle, the brand, and the political-economy positioning of the group within Romania.

The reclusive owner is one of Europe’s most consequential media owners

Zoltán Teszári founded what is now Digi Romania in 1996, when he set up Analog CATV, a small cable-TV company in Brașov, and merged it with TVS Holding Brașov, which he had founded in 1992. Over the next three decades he built the country’s largest fibre network, the country’s largest pay-TV platform, one of the country’s largest mobile operators (and the leading operator for mobile number portability for 13 consecutive years, per the 2025 annual report), and the country’s leading commercial digital news platform, before expanding into Spain, Italy, Portugal and Belgium. The 2025 annual report shows Teszári holding 60.1% of the economic interest and roughly 91% of the voting rights of the listed parent, a level of control that is unusual even by the standards of European founder-owned media-and-telecom groups.

Teszári himself has rarely given interviews and almost never appears at industry events. He lives in Oradea, in western Romania, rather than Bucharest. Romania Insider notes that “many of his employees don’t know what he looks like.” The 2025 annual report acknowledges his unique position bluntly in its risk factors: “Mr. Teszári’s continued involvement in the strategic oversight of the Group is essential”, a sentence that means, in plain English, that the bond covenants and credit facilities of one of the largest telecoms operators in Central Europe depend on a single individual remaining at the helm. The report adds that, given Teszári’s controlling stake and the Class A shares’ 10-votes-each structure, “the interests of Mr. Zoltán Teszári may not always be aligned with those of other holders of Shares.” The free float on the Bucharest Stock Exchange has effectively no governance leverage.

Romanian editorial values are stated cautiously in the filing, but stated

Annual reports filed under EU sustainability rules now have to discuss editorial impact, and the 2025 Digi report does. In its sustainability section, the company describes its main editorial impact in this way: the group’s “TV, radio and telecom platforms make a clear distinction between informational journalism and opinion journalism. As a rule, our journalists provide information, not opinions. This way, the public is not misled.” The same section flags as an opportunity that “by promoting fact-based, well-researched journalism on its TV and radio platforms, the company can increase viewership and become a reliable source of information for the public.” Both statements are filed under “consumers and end-users — access to (quality) information.”

This is corporate-filing language, of course, and it tells you what the company wants to be on the record saying, not what every Digi24 broadcast actually does. But for a Romanian commercial broadcaster to put on file with the Bucharest Stock Exchange a public commitment to a fact-based editorial line distinct from opinion is a meaningful signal in a country where the regulator itself was found by Reuters Institute researchers to have approved electoral programming sold to candidates as labelled paid content.

Romanian regulators put Digi at the very top of the market, and that is its own risk

The annual report itself does not publish company-specific market-share figures, but data published by the Romanian National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications (ANCOM) covering end-2024 give the clearest picture. ANCOM headline figures show Digi holding 72% of fixed internet connections and 75% of TV-retransmission subscribers, clearly dominant in both categories. In mobile, Digi is a major challenger rather than the overall market leader: Orange leads on active SIM cards with around 35%, and Digi is second at 28%, with 30% of active mobile internet connections. (Digi itself emphasises a different metric, namely individual residential subscribers, on which its share is higher; the 2025 annual report states that Digi has remained Romania’s leading operator for mobile number portability for 13 consecutive years.) Layered on top of that infrastructure position is Digi24 (a leading news brand), digi24.ro (one of Romania’s highest-traffic general-news sites), the Digi Sport family, and four national radio stations. No other media owner in Romania controls a comparable bundle of distribution, network and content.

That dominance has now triggered the most significant Romanian telecoms-regulation event in over a decade. In January 2025, ANCOM proposed to reintroduce wholesale fixed-access regulation in Romania, identifying Digi Romania as having significant market power. ANCOM’s analysis, published in March 2025, found that in 6,288 Romanian localities, overwhelmingly rural, Digi was either the only fixed-broadband provider or held a market share above 70%, covering 5.3 million inhabitants in 2.02 million households. In 5,702 of those localities, Digi was the only provider; in only 64 was there competition from three or more operators. ANCOM proposed obligations including third-party access to Digi’s infrastructure, the publication of a reference offer, and fair access tariffs.

The European Commission initially raised serious doubts about ANCOM’s proposal, arguing that the market entry barriers were not high enough to justify wholesale regulation and warning of potential investment risks. After a Phase 2 in-depth investigation that included input from BEREC and further dialogue with ANCOM, the Commission reversed its position. In April 2026 the Commission cleared ANCOM’s plan (narrowed slightly to 5,894 localities) finding that the regulation was proportionate and justified, that Digi’s first-mover advantage and rural population density made parallel network buildout commercially unviable, and that the proposed remedies were unlikely to deter Digi’s future investment. Digi must now grant third-party access to its rural fibre infrastructure under fair, non-discriminatory terms. For a company whose business model has been built on distribution dominance, this is a structural change.

Digi24 just walked off the must-carry list over a fight about online platforms

The other live regulatory story is at the broadcast end. From 30 January 2014 until early 2026, Digi24 was on Romania’s must-carry list, the set of channels that all Romanian electronic-communications distributors are legally obliged to carry, free of charge, up to a 25% cap on their channel offering. Must-carry status has historically been a major distribution boost for any Romanian news channel.

On 3 February 2026, however, in the public meeting at which the CNA published the 2026 must-carry list, Digi’s representative announced that Digi24 was leaving the list at its own request. The reason, Digi said, was a dispute about online retransmission: under Romania’s Audiovisual Law, must-carry rights apply to all electronic-communications distributors, including online streaming platforms. Digi24 wanted to grant retransmission rights only to traditional cable, DTH and IPTV networks, not to online platforms run by competitors such as Antena Group’s Antena Play, ProTV’s Voyo, or Megogo. Faced with the CNA’s view that must-carry status applied across all platforms uniformly, Digi24 chose to withdraw from the regime altogether.

CNA vice-president Valentin Jucan publicly contested Digi’s framing, calling the announcement “a complete lack of closeness to the truth” and arguing that Digi24’s withdrawal was “a strictly commercial decision” being repackaged as a regulatory dispute. The decision matters because it confirms that, for the first time in over a decade, distribution of Digi24 to Romanian audiences is no longer regulatory-mandated, but commercial. For a news channel embedded inside a group that also controls 75% of Romania’s pay-TV distribution and 72% of its fixed-broadband connections, that is a meaningful shift in the regulatory perimeter around the journalism.

What to watch in 2026

Three things will define how the Digi story reads a year from now.

First, whether the underlying operating profitability of the Romanian core can keep funding the Spanish and Portuguese network builds without further leverage growth: at 3.19× net debt / EBITDA the group is below investment grade and has visibly less cushion than it did a year ago, and another €798m capex year would push leverage further.

Second, the implementation of ANCOM’s wholesale fixed-access regulation: how the reference offer is priced, which alternative providers actually take it up, and whether rural-Romania consumers see meaningful price or choice changes will matter both for Digi’s revenue trajectory in those 5,894 localities and for the broader Romanian information ecosystem.

Third, whether Digi24 can hold its viewership and trust position in a Romanian media market where 26% trust in news, an annulled election, and a far-right movement that openly attacks mainstream newsrooms have made the operating environment as politically fraught as it has been at any point in the post-1989 period.

Underneath all of that sits the succession question. Teszári is 67 years old and has been the strategic centre of this company for nearly three decades. The 2025 annual report explicitly notes that his continued involvement is essential, and that any departure would constitute material risk under the group’s debt arrangements. There is no public signal of a transition plan. For shareholders, employees, journalists, and Romanian press freedom alike, the medium-term governance of one of Central Europe’s most consequential media-and-telecom groups depends materially on the continued presence, and choices, of one reclusive man in Oradea.