Ekspress Grupp

Ekspress Grupp had a steady 2025 by its own modest standards: revenue grew, digital subscriptions rose, and the company remained profitable. But the headline numbers mask a year of significant structural moves: a forced sale of a news portal, a leadership transition at the top, and an increasing reliance on non-journalism revenue streams to sustain growth. It is a portrait of a media group navigating real pressure in small markets, making pragmatic choices but with limited room for error.

Ekspress Grupp: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: AS Ekspress Grupp Consolidated Interim Report for Q4 and 12 months of 2025, approved by the Management Board on 19 February 2026.

Ekspress Grupp is a Tallinn-based media company listed on the Nasdaq Tallinn stock exchange. It is the dominant media group across the Baltic states, operating in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Its flagship brand is Delfi, a network of news portals that are the most-visited online news destinations in all three countries. Alongside Delfi, the group owns some of the most historically significant journalism titles in the region: Eesti Ekspress, a weekly newspaper founded in September 1989 as Estonia’s first independent paper under Soviet rule, and Maaleht, a weekly focused on rural life with deep roots in Estonian civil society. The group holds a 50% stake in Õhtuleht Kirjastus, publisher of the country’s most widely read tabloid, Õhtuleht, and owns ELTA, Lithuania’s national news agency. In Latvia, the group also operates Biļešu Paradīze, one of the Baltic states’ leading ticket sales platforms.

Ekspress Grupp: journalism asset map

Signals

The group grew, but mostly thanks to conferences and a publicly funded AI project

Revenue rose 5% to €80.2 million, which looks healthy on the surface. But the detail matters. The two biggest contributors to that growth were the Estonian Training and Conference Centre (acquired mid-2024) and a Lithuanian conference company (acquired late 2024), neither of which is journalism. Together they drove the large jump in the “other goods and services” revenue line, which more than doubled from €4.8 million to €10.7 million. The other notable growth driver was a €3 million EU-funded project run by Delfi Lithuania to build a tool for the automatic identification of false information, a project that is time-limited and non-recurring in nature, running from early 2025 through mid-2026. Strip out the conferences and the AI project, and the underlying core media business is growing subscriptions but not generating enough new revenue to offset the continuing fall in advertising income.

Advertising revenue, the lifeblood of digital news operations, fell 7% for the full year and dropped a sharp 13% in the fourth quarter alone. The Baltic economies slowed significantly in 2025, and advertisers pulled back accordingly. The company’s own report is candid about this: “the general weak economic environment in the Baltic States” is cited repeatedly as the primary constraint on results.

The group was forced to sell one of its most significant acquisitions

In December 2025, Ekspress Grupp sold Lrytas, a major Lithuanian online news portal, after a prolonged regulatory process. This was not a strategic choice. In 2022, the group had acquired 100% of Lrytas without notifying Lithuania’s Competition Council, which found the deal violated competition law: Delfi.lt and Lrytas.lt were the two largest online news portals in Lithuania, together commanding over 40% of the market. The Council ruled the acquisition illegal and ordered divestiture. The sale, completed on 29 December 2025, contributed to a combined one-off charge of €4.2 million in the fourth quarter, alongside an impairment loss related to the restructuring of Geenius Meedia. Lrytas had approximately 11,350 digital subscribers at the end of December 2025.

The episode illustrates a structural constraint that affects all Baltic media consolidation: the markets are simply too small to absorb much ownership concentration without triggering competition concerns. When you are already dominant in a country, acquisition-led growth has firm legal limits.

One man controls 96% of the company, and just tightened his grip

The most striking corporate development in 2025 barely features in the company’s own results communications. In November and December 2025, Hans H. Luik, the entrepreneur who founded Eesti Ekspress in 1989 and who has controlled Ekspress Grupp for decades through his holding company HHL Rühm, launched a voluntary takeover bid for all shares he did not already own, at €1.25 per share.

The bid succeeded. By year-end, HHL Rühm held 96.12% of all shares. Under Estonian law, once a shareholder crosses the 90% threshold, they acquire the right to compulsorily buy out the remaining shares, effectively taking the company private. Luik now has both the legal right and the stated ability to do exactly that within three months of the settlement date. Whether or not he exercises it, the practical effect is already visible: Ekspress Grupp, listed on the Nasdaq Tallinn exchange since 2007, is now controlled to a degree that makes its public listing largely ceremonial.

This is not inherently negative: Luik has a long personal commitment to independent journalism and founded some of the titles the group now owns. But the structural shift matters. A publicly listed company has disclosure obligations, minority shareholder protections, and at least some formal exposure to external scrutiny. A company with a 96% controlling shareholder is answerable primarily to that one person. The founding figure of Estonian independent journalism has become, in financial terms, the near-sole owner of the Baltic region’s most significant news group.

A CEO came and went, with notable speed

2025 was also a year of significant leadership churn. In January, the CFO departed within weeks of joining; a replacement was appointed and then also left by October, when a third CFO was installed. Most significantly, long-serving CEO Mari-Liis Rüütsalu completed her term on 31 December 2025 and was replaced by Liina Liiv, who had only joined the management board the previous month. The supervisory board also saw multiple changes, including the departure of Hans Luik himself from the board, shortly before he launched his takeover bid from outside it. The volume of governance changes across a single year is unusual for a company of this size and deserves monitoring.

Advertising is falling and subscriptions are not growing fast enough to compensate

Subscription revenue grew 3% to €21 million, and the number of digital subscribers across the Baltic states reached 255,964, up 7% on the year. Both are genuine positives, achieved against a backdrop of weak consumer confidence. Delfi Meedia in Estonia reached 124,637 subscribers, a strong figure for a country of 1.4 million people. Latvia grew 14% and Lithuania 12%, albeit from smaller bases.

The problem is the arithmetic. Advertising revenue, at €39.1 million, remains nearly twice the size of subscription revenue at €21 million. The business model still depends heavily on advertising, and advertising is declining. Subscriptions are growing, but not at a pace that compensates. The group’s own target, set in 2022, was to reach 340,000 digital subscribers across the Baltic states by the end of 2026. With 255,964 at the end of 2025, reaching that goal would require adding 84,000 subscribers in a single year. In all of 2025, the group added 18,000.

The group is diversifying away from journalism, quietly but consistently

One detail likely to go unreported elsewhere: in December 2025, Ekspress Grupp acquired Liikluslab Baltic, a digital platform for traffic education and driving school services. This is the kind of business, practical, subscription-based, growing, that makes good financial sense for a group looking to reduce its reliance on advertising and expand recurring digital revenue.

The pattern across 2024 and 2025 is consistent: the group has bought a conference business, a ticket sales business, and now a driving instruction platform. All are digital, all are growing, and none are news. The company still classifies all of these under a single “media segment” in its financial statements, which makes it impossible from the outside to separate the journalism economics from the rest. The group’s stated mission is “to serve democracy” through journalism. Its actual investment decisions reveal an increasing reliance on non-journalism revenue streams to sustain overall growth, not yet dominant, but directionally clear.

The EBITDA margin is slipping, and the profitability target looks out of reach

The group’s long-term target, set by its Supervisory Board in 2022, was to achieve an EBITDA margin above 15% by the end of 2026. In 2021 it was at exactly 15%. Since then it has declined every year: 14%, 14%, 14%, and now 13%. With advertising continuing to fall and operating costs rising 8% in 2025, the direction of travel does not suggest a return to 15% is near.

The profitability squeeze matters because it limits how much the group can invest in journalism. Unlike Agora in Poland, Ekspress Grupp does not have a profitable cinema chain or a national radio network to cross-subsidise its editorial operations. The media business is essentially all there is, and within it, the profitable growth is increasingly coming from the non-journalism parts.

The group’s journalism is stable, but stability is not the same as health

None of this means that Ekspress Grupp’s journalism is in crisis. Delfi in all three Baltic countries remains trusted and widely used. Eesti Ekspress still produces investigative journalism of genuine importance. ELTA operates Lithuania’s national wire service. The major print titles continue to publish. There are no large-scale editorial redundancies, no equivalent of Agora’s structural losses in its press segment.

But the financial architecture around that journalism is shifting. Revenues from conferences, ticket sales, outdoor screens, and now driving instruction are increasingly what moves the top line, while journalism-derived revenue, advertising in decline, subscriptions growing but slowly, contributes less of the group’s growth each year. Whether the group’s editorial mission can be sustained on that narrowing financial base, or whether this is the beginning of a longer drift toward being a digital services company that also happens to run some news portals, is the question that 2025’s results leave open.