Dnevnik

Dnevnik d.d., the Ljubljana-based publisher of Slovenia’s daily newspaper Dnevnik and the country’s most-read weekly Nedeljski dnevnik, spent 2024 reorganising itself into a holding-and-operating structure: the journalism, the journalists, the brands and the websites were all transferred to a new wholly owned subsidiary, Dnevnik Mediji, d.o.o., while the original company kept the real estate and the financial portfolio. What remains at the top of the group is therefore no longer a publisher in any operational sense. It is a holding company that owns a newspaper business, owns a building that the newspaper business rents from it, and lends money to other companies in the orbit of its largest shareholder.

The publishing business itself, sitting one level below in Dnevnik Mediji, posted a first-full-year net profit of €449,728 for 2024. The holding company on top reported a net profit of €164,008 in 2024 and €324,119 in 2025: numbers driven mainly by rent and by interest on a €3.7 million loan to Terme Čatež, the Slovenian tourist resort at the centre of a long-running criminal proceeding in which the company’s chairman, Bojan Petan, was acquitted at first instance in February 2026, with prosecution appeal pending.

Dnevnik d.d.: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: Dnevnik d.d. audited annual report for 2024 (Forvis Mazars, unqualified opinion, signed 11 June 2025); unaudited balance sheet and income statement filed with AJPES for 2025. Dnevnik Mediji, d.o.o. (the operating subsidiary) reported audit-confirmed net profit of €449,728 and year-end equity of €1.0m for 2024, on revenue of approximately €14.2m as filed with AJPES; its 2025 statements had not been filed at the time of writing.

Dnevnik’s principal media assets

All of the above sit inside Dnevnik Mediji, d.o.o. with effect from 1 January 2024.

Signals

The 2024 spin-off has separated the journalism from the asset base

On 30 July 2024, Dnevnik d.d.’s shareholders approved the legal division of the company. The publishing business (newspapers, websites, puzzle magazines, brands, employees, equipment) was transferred to a newly created wholly owned subsidiary, Dnevnik Mediji, d.o.o. The court register entry was made on 20 September 2024, but the accounting cut-off was retroactive to 1 January 2024, which is why the audited 2024 numbers for the parent already show a company with no employees, almost no operating revenue, and almost no operating costs. Dnevnik Mediji took on the workforce of around 105 people; Dnevnik d.d. ended 2024 with zero. The same model has been reported as in preparation at Delo, the larger Slovenian daily: separate the journalism from the property book.

The publishing subsidiary is profitable; the parent is something else

Dnevnik Mediji, d.o.o. earned a first-full-year net profit of €449,728 on equity of €1.0 million at the end of 2024, figures audit-confirmed via the parent’s notes. This is the figure for the journalism business: a publisher that has cut costs sufficiently to be modestly profitable in a small and shrinking market.

The parent’s reported profit of €164,008 in 2024 is a different kind of number. Most of the parent’s net sales (€321,279 of €415,541) is rent and services billed to Dnevnik Mediji, the operating subsidiary that now occupies space in the parent’s building, plus a further €262,267 of group-internal sales billed to DZS, the parent’s largest shareholder, which also occupies the building. On top of that, the parent’s financial revenue of €217,959 is almost entirely interest from related parties: €198,154 was received from Terme Čatež and €3,435 from DZS Investicije. Taken together, identifiable related-party income amounts to about 82% of the parent’s net sales plus financial revenue. This is what the holding-and-investment vehicle does for a living: it collects rent from its own subsidiary and from its largest shareholder, and it earns interest on loans to other companies in the same ownership orbit.

The largest disclosed loan on the parent’s balance sheet is to Terme Čatež

The single largest individually identified loan on Dnevnik d.d.’s 2024 balance sheet is €3,733,965 owed to it by Terme Čatež d.d., a Slovenian tourist-resort company. The loan is secured by mortgage and pays a mix of fixed and floating interest, and in 2024 it generated €198,154, roughly 90% of the parent’s reported financial revenue.

Terme Čatež has been the focus of long-running Slovenian criminal proceedings against Bojan Petan, the chairman (predsednik uprave) of Dnevnik d.d. and director of Dnevnik Mediji, d.o.o. Reporters Without Borders previously documented those proceedings, which related to alleged abuse of position in the 2007–2008 privatisation of Terme Čatež. On 25 February 2026, the Koper District Court acquitted Petan and three co-defendants at first instance. The prosecution has announced an appeal, the judgment is therefore not final, and Petan has consistently denied wrongdoing throughout the twelve-year proceeding.

The legal status is one thing. The financial relevance for media-ownership analysis is straightforward: a Slovenian newspaper-publishing group’s audited holding company is, on its own balance sheet, a creditor of a related-party tourism business at a scale roughly equal to four times the equity of its publishing subsidiary, and the interest it earns from that loan dominates its reported financial revenue.

The shareholder structure is concentrated, mostly Slovenian, with one foreign anchor

Four shareholders together hold 87% of Dnevnik d.d. The Slovenian publishing-and-investment group DZS, d.d. holds 35.11%, and its subsidiary DZS Investicije, d.o.o. holds another 15.94%, together 51.05%. Delo Prodaja, d.d., the long-standing newspaper-distribution arm associated with Dnevnik’s larger competitor Delo, holds 10.35%. The Austrian publishing group Styria Media International GmbH, owner of Die Presse and Kleine Zeitung, holds 25.74%, a stake it has held since the early 2000s and one of the most stable foreign-strategic minority holdings in Slovenian print media. Styria is represented on the supervisory board through dr. Klaus Schweighofer.

The audited annual report contains a notable disclosure on the DZS relationship: management formally states that Dnevnik d.d. is not in a “factual group” with DZS, and that no unified group management is exercised over investment, finance or production decisions. The legal effect of that disclosure is that Dnevnik d.d. does not have to prepare a related-party report under the Slovenian Companies Act. Whether the relationship is legally a factual group is something a reader cannot resolve from outside, but the disclosure sits alongside the fact noted above, that some 82% of the parent’s identifiable income comes from companies inside the DZS ownership orbit and from Terme Čatež, where the chairman has separately faced criminal proceedings.

A new dividend programme has been distributing real cash

The 30 July 2024 AGM approved a gross dividend of €1.80 per share for 2023, ten times the €0.18 paid the year before. The total distribution was €557,339, paid to shareholders on 13 January 2025. This is a meaningful change of policy: under the new holding-company architecture, the parent is now configured to convert its rent and interest income into shareholder distributions in a way it had not previously done.

What 2026 will tell us

Three things would be worth watching when Dnevnik Mediji files its first full standalone annual report for 2025. First, whether the operating subsidiary held its modestly profitable position through the year, or whether the broader Slovenian advertising and circulation environment caught up with it. Second, whether the asset that appears to be moving to sale on the parent’s balance sheet is real estate (the most likely answer) or something else. Third, whether the 25.74% Styria Media International stake, the only sizeable foreign-strategic anchor in the company’s ownership, remains in place through any further restructuring of the kind Delo is reported to be pursuing.

Sources: Dnevnik d.d., audited annual report for 2024 (auditor: Forvis Mazars, družba za revizijo, d.o.o., Ljubljana; responsible auditor Nataša Mohorčič; unqualified opinion, signed 11 June 2025). Unaudited balance sheet and income statement filed with AJPES for 2025. Reporting on the 25 February 2026 first-instance acquittal in the Terme Čatež proceedings: Slovenian press of that date (RTV Slovenija, Siol, N1, Delo, 24ur, Primorske novice). Background on Bojan Petan and the Terme Čatež proceedings: Reporters Without Borders, country report on Slovenia by Blaž Zgaga. Currency conversions, where used, applied at European Central Bank annual reference rates.