Nine Entertainment

Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Limited, the Australian commercial television, publishing and streaming group that owns the Nine Network, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review and the Stan streaming service, reported in its financial year ended 30 June 2025 revenue up 2% to AUD 2,676.5 million (approximately €1,528m / US$1,695m), and a statutory profit after tax of AUD 133.3 million (approximately €76m / US$84m), broadly flat on the previous year.

Two events define the year. First, Nine’s operating earnings (EBITDA before one-off items) fell 6% despite audience and subscription growth reported across the business, a softer advertising market and higher Olympics content costs offset the improvement in digital subscriptions. On a like-for-like basis, profit after tax before one-off items fell more steeply, by 10%, from AUD 216.4m to AUD 194.4m. Second, and more consequentially for the long term, Nine agreed in May 2025 to sell its 60% stake in Domain, Australia’s second property classifieds platform, to the US real estate data group CoStar. The sale, completed after the year-end, returned AUD 1.4 billion in cash to Nine and triggered a fully franked special dividend of AUD 777 million to shareholders. Domain contributed AUD 146 million in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) to the group during FY2025, roughly 19% of the divisional total, and its departure removes Nine’s largest single growth asset from the portfolio.

What remains is a narrower company: a commercial broadcaster, a national streaming service, and three major metropolitan newspapers that, on management’s own description, now generate an operating margin “as good as any major publisher world-wide”. The question for the next year is what Nine becomes once the marketplace business that underwrote much of its digital transition is gone.

Nine Entertainment, key financial indicators

Source: Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Limited, Annual Report 2025. Currency conversions use European Central Bank annual average reference rates as published by Deutsche Bundesbank: EUR 1 = AUD 1.6404 applied to FY2024 figures (year ended 30 June 2024), EUR 1 = AUD 1.7518 applied to FY2025 figures (year ended 30 June 2025). US dollar equivalents derived via calendar-year EUR/USD averages and are indicative. Nine’s fiscal year straddles two calendar years; the convention used here applies each calendar year’s annual average to the corresponding fiscal year.

Revenue and EBITDA by business line, FY2025

Source: Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Limited, Annual Report 2025, segment note (Note 2.1) and Operating and Financial Review. EBITDA share percentages are on an economic-interest-adjusted basis as presented by the group and exclude corporate costs.

Nine’s principal media assets

Source: Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Limited, Annual Report 2025

Signals

Signal one: Publishing is no longer a declining business

For years the assumption embedded in Australian media analysis has been that Nine’s mastheads are a heritage drag on a digital-first group. The FY2025 accounts do not support that reading. Nine Publishing as a whole produced AUD 153 million in EBITDA on AUD 526 million of revenue, a margin of 29%, with costs down AUD 33 million on the year. Within that segment, management discloses that the three metropolitan mastheads, responsible for 85% of Publishing revenue, now operate at an EBITDA margin of 33%, which the CEO’s address describes as “as good as any major publisher world-wide”. Digital subscription revenue across the mastheads grew 15%, paying subscribers across The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review reached more than 510,000, and the three titles collectively reached 11.4 million Australians monthly. The single most important editorial data point of the year sits inside this segment: for the first time, digital subscription revenue growth at the mastheads exceeded the decline in print, what the group describes as “a significant inflexion point for the business”. On an EBITDA-share basis, Publishing (32%) is now the second-largest division in the group after Total Television (34%), and once Domain is removed will become the single most profitable business line in Nine’s portfolio. A more accurate description of Nine in 2026 is a subscription-journalism and streaming business that also owns a broadcast network, not the other way around.

Signal two: the Meta revenue cliff has arrived

In FY2024 Nine received licensing payments from Meta for the use of Australian journalism on Facebook and Instagram, under the arrangement that emerged from the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code. In FY2025 those payments ended. The Publishing segment still receives licensing revenues from Google (the Annual Report confirms the Google agreement continued during the year but does not disclose the amount) and the CEO describes the Meta exit as “disappointing”. The Australian Government’s proposed News Bargaining Incentive, a mechanism the Albanese Government has signalled it intends to implement, is the regulatory response Nine is publicly supporting, as is its push for the commercial broadcasting tax to be permanently abolished rather than merely suspended. The harder problem the company flags is not Meta: it is generative artificial intelligence platforms that, in the CEO’s words, are “scraping our news platforms to train their systems without Nine’s permission or any payment”. The group is now framing AI scraping in the same commercial-rights terms that underpinned the original platform bargaining push, and the Board has confirmed an internal AI oversight committee to govern Nine’s own deployment of the technology. Whether an AI-era equivalent of the 2021 bargaining code emerges will materially shape the economic basis of Australian journalism in the next cycle.

Signal three: Nine’s mastheads won 11 Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley

While the financial narrative focused on restructuring and the Domain sale, Nine’s journalism output collected more Walkley Awards in 2024 than any other Australian media organisation. Reporters from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and Nine’s 60 Minutes programme shared the Gold Walkley for a Building Bad series of investigations revealing that the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) had been infiltrated by outlaw motorcycle gangs and organised crime. Separate Walkleys recognised investigative reporting on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances contamination (“forever chemicals”) and on the mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s attempt to have a portrait of her removed from the National Gallery of Australia. During the year Nine opened a new Sydney Morning Herald bureau in Parramatta, western Sydney’s emerging political and demographic centre, and a new Washington D.C. bureau. The capital commitment to investigative and foreign reporting continued even as the advertising market declined, and the mastheads recorded audience growth on that content. For a listed company defending a 33% publishing EBITDA margin, this is a deliberate editorial choice: investment in reporting is being treated as a driver of the subscription business, not a cost of it.

Signal four: a single shareholder effectively retains 25% of Australia’s largest private television broadcaster

The substantial shareholders list records Bruce Gordon, through his company Birketu Pty Ltd and related entities, as the largest shareholder of Nine with 19.98% of the issued capital. In a note disclosed in shareholder filings, Birketu holds additional economic interests through equity swaps over a further 83,162,635 shares, bringing the total economic interest to 25.22%. Mr Gordon also controls WIN Corporation, Nine’s regional television affiliate, which paid Nine AUD 76.6 million in affiliate fees during FY2025 for the right to rebroadcast Nine’s programming in regional New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.

Signal five: Stan is now a profitable local streaming service funded by sport

Stan reported EBITDA of AUD 60 million on AUD 492 million of revenue in FY2025, a 31% increase in profitability, and reached around 2.5 million paying subscribers by August 2025. Sport drove the result: coverage of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics on Stan Sport grew sports subscribers by more than 50%, and the service acquired the Australian media rights to the English Premier League and the Emirates FA Cup from the Optus Sport disposal at the end of the year. What this means in editorial terms is that Stan, a service founded on general entertainment licensing, now has a commercial model increasingly dependent on live sport, which places Australia’s only locally owned streaming platform in direct competition for rights with the US-headquartered services and the traditional broadcasters. Stan’s 10% revenue growth and 6% growth in average revenue per user indicate the service has room to continue raising prices. Whether that sustains once the Optus Sport football rights cycle fully washes through the numbers is the material question for FY2026.

Signal six: Nine Radio was written down, and the reasons are structural

An impairment charge of AUD 40.6 million was recorded against the Nine Radio cash-generating unit during FY2025, a material write-down against the carrying value of the group’s radio licences. The stated reason is the broader migration of audiences from traditional broadcast radio to digital audio formats, in a commercial talk-radio market that grew only marginally during the year. Nine announced a restructure of its radio sales operation effective 1 July 2025, shifting to a more direct-sales model. The editorial implication is important: Nine’s radio stations, 2GB Sydney, 3AW Melbourne, 4BC Brisbane and 6PR Perth, are among the most politically influential talk-radio platforms in Australia, and this impairment represents management’s own assessment that the economic base supporting that influence is structurally narrowing. Around 23% of the stations’ audience now consumes the content via streaming rather than broadcast, a shift the commercial model has not yet fully adapted to.

Outlook

Nine entered FY2026 with a materially smaller balance sheet, a significantly smaller cash flow base than the consolidated FY2025 numbers suggest once Domain is removed, and a portfolio concentrated on three businesses: a broadcast and streaming video operation, a subscription-led journalism operation, and a commercial talk-radio network that has just been impaired. Net debt at year-end of AUD 583.7 million represented a net leverage ratio of 1.2x, and the post-year-end Domain proceeds of AUD 1.4 billion substantially strengthen that position even after the AUD 777 million special dividend. The medium-term strategic question for the group is simpler than the restructuring suggests: whether a smaller Nine can sustain the 33% publishing margin and the Stan profitability that have emerged from this year’s numbers while absorbing the loss of Meta licensing revenue, the structural decline in free-to-air and radio advertising, and the unresolved economic question posed by generative AI. For Australian journalism, which depends disproportionately on Nine’s publishing and television newsrooms for investigative capacity and public-interest reporting, the answer to that question is not an abstract one.

Sources: Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Limited, Annual Report 2025 (year ended 30 June 2025), filed with the Australian Securities Exchange on 27 August 2025; consolidated financial statements audited by Ernst & Young. FY2025 preliminary results announcement: 27 August 2025. 2025 Annual General Meeting speeches and presentation lodged with ASX on 7 November 2025 (ASX:NEC). Ownership data: Nine Entertainment Co. Holdings Limited, shareholder information section of Annual Report 2025 and substantial shareholder notices. Exchange rate references: European Central Bank annual average reference rates published by Deutsche Bundesbank (2024 and 2025). Australian legislative and regulatory context: News Media Bargaining Code (Australian Treasury); News Bargaining Incentive (Australian Government). Walkley Awards 2024 results: Walkley Foundation for Journalism.