Petit Press

Petit Press, a.s., the Bratislava-based Slovak publisher of the national daily SME, the regional Korzár, the English-language Slovak Spectator, the MY regional weekly network and the country’s most-read news website sme.sk, reported in its financial year ended 31 December 2025 net turnover of EUR 20.36 million and a profit after tax of EUR 809,537, down from EUR 952,723 the previous year.

Two events define the year, and they are connected. First, on 1 August 2025 Petit Press executed a cross-border demerger by separation (cezhraničná premena formou odštiepenia) under EU Directive 2019/2121, carving its printing plant out of the publishing company and into a newly-formed Czech subsidiary, Petit Printing Press, a.s., registered at Anežská 986/10 in Prague 1. The carved-out unit took EUR 8.47 million of assets with it. Accounting-wise the effect is dramatic: total assets on Petit Press’s balance sheet fell from EUR 19.86 million at the start of the year to EUR 12.10 million at the end, and equity fell from EUR 13.97 million to EUR 6.10 million. Second, the sharp fall in reported revenue, newspaper sales down 42%, total turnover down 17%, is largely an artefact of that same carve-out: printing revenue that Petit Press previously booked as in-house production now sits inside the Czech sister company and is bought back as an external service, at a materially higher cost line.

What remains in the publishing company is almost entirely a journalism business: a national opinion-forming daily, a regional daily, an English-language weekly, a network of around 35 regional and specialist titles, and the most-read Slovak news website. The more consequential editorial development of the year was not financial at all but the change of editor-in-chief at SME: Beata Balogová, who had led the paper for 11 years, was succeeded on 1 October 2025 by Roman Krpelan, a former deputy editor who had spent more than a decade outside journalism, most prominently as spokesperson and adviser to former Slovak president Andrej Kiska, before returning to Petit Press in 2023. The question for the near future is what Petit Press becomes once it is run as a pure-play journalism business inside an increasingly hostile Slovak media environment.

Petit Press, key financial indicators

Source: Petit Press, a.s., Riadna individuálna účtovná závierka k 31.12.2025 (audited statutory individual accounts); auditor’s report by Kreston Slovakia Audit, s.r.o., licence UDVA č. 429, signed by Mgr. Zuzana Kováčová (licence č. 1036), Bratislava, 9 April 2026. Slovakia is in the euro area; no EUR conversion is required. US dollar equivalents are derived via European Central Bank annual average reference rates published by Deutsche Bundesbank: EUR 1 = USD 1.0824 for 2024 and EUR 1 = USD 1.1300 for 2025. The balance sheet changes reflect both trading results and the cross-border demerger of the printing business on 1 August 2025 (see Signal one).

Revenue by type and geography, FY2025

Source: Petit Press, a.s., Riadna individuálna účtovná závierka k 31.12.2025, Notes E.1 and E.13. The sharp rise in foreign service revenue reflects cross-border billing to the newly-established Czech subsidiary Petit Printing Press, a.s. following the 1 August 2025 demerger.

Petit Press’s principal media assets

Source: Petit Press, a.s., Riadna individuálna účtovná závierka k 31.12.2025, Notes A.2 and C.3; publisher’s own corporate site (petitpress.sk); The Slovak Spectator and SME mastheads.

Signals

Signal one: the printing plant has left the company, and that is why the revenue line collapsed

Petit Press’s reported net turnover of EUR 20.36 million in 2025 is the lowest the company has recorded in at least twelve years: revenue has hovered between EUR 21.1 million and EUR 25.2 million every year from 2014 to 2024. Newspaper sales (tržby z predaja vlastných výrobkov), the “own products” line of the profit-and-loss account, fell 42% in a single year, from EUR 8.86 million to EUR 5.11 million, and stand at less than 40% of the 2017 peak. The first instinct on seeing numbers of that magnitude would be to describe them as the collapse of a print newspaper business. They are not. On 1 August 2025 Petit Press executed a cross-border demerger by separation under EU Directive 2019/2121, transferring the printing plant at Kopčianska 22 in Bratislava, including its rotary printing press, to a newly-formed Czech subsidiary registered in Prague at the same address as the ultimate Czech parent, PROXY-FINANCE a.s. For the first seven months of the year Petit Press booked the print works’ sales inside its own “own products” line. From 1 August onward those same printing presses sell their output to Petit Press as an arm’s-length service, and what was an internal cost becomes an external expense.

The evidence of the reclassification is visible on the cost side of the accounts: payments for external printing services rose from EUR 814,150 in 2024 to EUR 2,362,577 in 2025, an increase of EUR 1.5 million or 190%, almost precisely the missing piece of the “lost” newspaper revenue. The company also booked EUR 485,715 of proceeds from disposal of fixed assets during the year, representing the consideration for the transferred plant. The underlying journalism business is not collapsing. It has been unbundled from its printing infrastructure for legal and tax reasons that the accounts themselves do not explain.

Signal two: the ownership chain now runs Bratislava → Bratislava → Prague

Petit Press disclosed in its annual report that it is consolidated into the accounts of PROXY-FINANCE a.s., a private Czech investment group based at Anežská 10, Prague 1. The immediate parent is Prvá slovenská investičná skupina, a.s. (PSIS), the Slovak investment holding that has been the controlling shareholder of the publisher since its founding in 1993; PROXY-FINANCE in turn owns 100% of PSIS. Ownership of Petit Press itself, as disclosed in the statutory filings, is split between PSIS as majority shareholder; Pluralis B.V., an Amsterdam-based blended-finance investment vehicle managed by the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) of New York, which acquired 34% from Penta Investments in April 2021 in what was Pluralis’s first investment; and minority stakes attributable to Petit Press’s chief executive Alexej Fulmek together with vehicles Big Bang s.r.o. and OMH mezzanine s.r.o. Pluralis itself is owned by a coalition of European foundations, impact investors and media companies including Mediahuis, King Baudouin Foundation, Tinius Trust, MDIF, Soros Economic Development Fund, Oak Foundation, ERSTE Foundation and VP Capital, and its investment mandate, as publicly stated, explicitly excludes involvement in editorial decision-making.

The 2025 demerger adds a fourth node: the new Prague-based printing company Petit Printing Press, a.s. sits between the Bratislava publisher and the Czech parent, at the PROXY-FINANCE registered office. The editorial implication is subtle but matters. Petit Press describes itself as a parent company in its own right: it holds majority stakes in eight Slovak subsidiaries and a 40% interest in I-Europa s.r.o. acquired in November 2025, but it exempts itself from the obligation to file consolidated accounts, leaving PROXY-FINANCE in Prague as the only entity above which consolidated figures are prepared. For a publisher whose national daily SME is one of the most prominent critical voices in Slovak public life, the consolidation perimeter matters because it is the perimeter at which ownership influence, if it exists, would ultimately be exercised.

Signal three: the newsroom kept the cash

One reading of a cross-border demerger that moves fixed assets out of a media company is that the media company has been stripped. The FY2025 balance sheet does not support that reading. Of the EUR 8.47 million of assets transferred to Petit Printing Press, EUR 7.37 million was tangible plant and EUR 250,000 was cash. Cash and bank balances held at the publishing company actually rose over the year, from EUR 6.96 million at 31 December 2024 to EUR 7.40 million at 31 December 2025, even after paying out EUR 500,000 in ordinary dividends and EUR 103,097 in board tantiemes from 2024 earnings. Operating cash flow generated by the business in 2025 was EUR 887,207, up from EUR 651,653 in 2024. The publisher’s liquid assets, at year-end, exceed the book value of its remaining equity (EUR 6.10 million). Read together, the accounts show a company that kept its working capital, its receivables, its subscribers, its brands and its journalists, and exported its industrial base to a Czech-domiciled sister company. For the continuity of the publishing operation this is better news than the headline revenue decline suggests. Whether the commercial terms on which Petit Press now buys printing back from its Prague-domiciled sister are neutral, favourable, or otherwise is a separate matter: related-party transaction notes in the FY2025 accounts do not yet show traffic with Petit Printing Press in the comparative table, because the new entity came into existence mid-year.

Signal four: SME has a new editor-in-chief for the first time in 11 years, and the change is unusual

On 11 September 2025 Petit Press announced that Roman Krpelan, 47, would succeed Beata Balogová as editor-in-chief of SME from 1 October. Balogová, editor-in-chief since 2014 and the longest-serving in the daily’s history, remains with the publisher as lead columnist. Krpelan’s appointment is unusual for two reasons. First, SME has traditionally been led by career journalists, and Krpelan spent 13 of the previous 15 years working outside the newsroom, as spokesperson and adviser to former Slovak president Andrej Kiska, in public affairs, and in political communications, before returning to Petit Press in March 2023 as director of SME Creative, the publisher’s content and creative studio, and then as director of the SME daily and a board member from November 2023. Second, his remit is wider than the SME newsroom alone: he takes editorial responsibility for SME, Korzár, Index and the lifestyle portal Closer, a consolidation of titles under a single editorial head that has not previously been the norm. Petit Press’s chief executive Alexej Fulmek publicly defended the appointment by citing Krpelan’s “professionalism, independence and sense of justice” and his ability to guide the paper through pressures from artificial intelligence and social-media-driven polarisation. The editorial test of the change will be whether SME maintains its record of adversarial political coverage under a Prime Minister whose government has moved aggressively against independent media, including dissolving the public broadcaster RTVS in June 2024 and replacing it with a new, more politically controlled entity (STVR) in 2025.

Signal five: the travel agency is now 11% of the company’s turnover and the advertising business is eroding

A close reading of the revenue note reveals a business mix that is unusual for a national newspaper publisher. Advertising (inzercia), historically the financial backbone of a paper like SME, generated EUR 7.98 million in 2025, down from EUR 8.85 million in 2024, a 9.8% decline that is steeper than the headline numbers suggest, because it continues a multi-year erosion. The fastest-growing service line in the mix, by contrast, is the in-house travel agency (cestovná kancelária), where revenue rose from EUR 1.96 million in 2024 to EUR 2.23 million in 2025, a 14% year-on-year increase, taking it to 11% of the publisher’s net turnover. A further EUR 158,598 of prepaid travel packages sat on the balance sheet at year-end as short-term deferred revenue (up from EUR 117,453 the year before). A vertically-integrated newspaper publisher that sells advertising, prints regional weeklies, runs a podcast network and books holidays through its own tour operator is a business model that protected Petit Press through a decade of print decline. But it also means advertising, the segment most directly tied to the journalism, is now only 39% of the total revenue mix, and declining. The implication for the newsroom is uncomfortable: the commercial operations that increasingly subsidise SME‘s editorial capacity are themselves only loosely tied to the editorial product.

Signal six: the MDIF shareholding is the structural guarantee that matters

Petit Press operates in a country whose Prime Minister, Robert Fico, has openly described critical media as “enemy media”; whose government pushed through legislation in June 2024 to dissolve the public broadcaster and install a politically-connected successor with a director appointed in a closed-door vote in May 2025; and where the International Press Institute, Reporters Without Borders, the Media Freedom Rapid Response coalition and Freedom House have all documented a sustained deterioration in press freedom over 2024 and 2025. In that environment the most important structural fact about SME‘s publisher is not financial but ownership-side: the 34% stake acquired from the Penta financial group in April 2021 by Pluralis B.V., an Amsterdam-based vehicle whose explicit mission is to invest in independent media in European countries where media pluralism is under threat, and whose blended-finance ownership base (spanning foundations, impact investors and European news publishers) is engineered to prevent any single shareholder from exerting editorial influence. The Pluralis investment was framed at the time by MDIF, which manages the vehicle, as “an expression of faith in the strength of [Petit Press’s] newspaper brands and especially in the stability of the SME daily”. Eleven years earlier, the arrival of a different minority shareholder, Penta Investments, had triggered the walkout of most of the SME newsroom and the founding of the rival Denník N, now a subscription-funded daily with over 80,000 paying readers. The Pluralis stake, combined with PSIS’s controlling position and the management-side minority, is the ownership structure under which SME now weathers its second period of serious political pressure. It is also the structural feature that most sharply distinguishes Petit Press from most of its peers in Central and Eastern Europe, where the dominant recent trend has been the accumulation of regional and national media in the hands of domestic investors with political or business interests beyond the media sector.

Signal seven: the workforce is 23% smaller than a year ago

Average full-time-equivalent headcount at Petit Press fell from 236 in 2024 to 181 in 2025, a reduction of 55 employees, or 23%, in a single year. The company-wide total at 31 December 2025 was 186 employees of whom 20 were managers, compared with 236 employees and 17 managers the year before. The salary line fell from EUR 5.19 million to EUR 4.43 million, a 15% reduction. Part of this reduction reflects the transfer of printing-plant employees to Petit Printing Press in Prague. But a reduction of that magnitude is unlikely to be fully explained by the demerger alone, since the printing plant is a capital-intensive rather than overwhelmingly labour-intensive operation, and the figures indicate additional downsizing within the publishing operation. Petit Press reports in public communications that around 150 journalists across SME, Korzár, Index, Closer, the MY regional network and the Sportnet platform contribute to its mastheads; that figure is an editorial headcount quoted by the publisher rather than a statutory disclosure. Whatever its distribution across the company, the headcount reduction is the single clearest indicator in the accounts that Petit Press is running a leaner journalism business in 2025 than in any previous year since the Pluralis investment.

Outlook

Petit Press entered 2026 as a structurally different company than it was 12 months earlier. The balance sheet is roughly 40% smaller, equity is roughly half what it was, and the industrial base has been moved to a Czech-domiciled sibling. What remains inside the Bratislava publisher is the journalism: a national daily that is Slovakia’s leading independent title, the country’s most-read news website, a regional daily, a regional weekly network, an English-language weekly, a suite of specialist monthly titles, and the country’s most-listened-to podcast output. Cash on hand at year-end of EUR 7.40 million exceeds remaining equity, operating cash generation of EUR 887,000 is stable, and the Pluralis minority shareholding provides a structural buffer against political pressure on the ownership side. The commercial challenges are nonetheless real: advertising revenue continues to decline at single-digit rates, newspaper sales ex-printing have fallen for every year since the 2017 peak, and the travel agency is growing faster than the editorial business. The editorial question for FY2026 is whether a newer and more consolidated editorial leadership under Roman Krpelan, responsible now for four mastheads rather than one, can maintain the reporting standards that made SME one of the two daily newspapers that Slovakia’s current government considers adversarial. For Slovak journalism, which in 2026 faces one of the most rapidly deteriorating press-freedom environments in the European Union according to international monitors, the answer matters.

Sources: Petit Press, a.s., Riadna individuálna účtovná závierka k 31. decembru 2025 (statutory individual accounts, filed in the Slovak Register účtovných závierok), comprising balance sheet (Súvaha Úč POD 1-01), profit and loss account (Výkaz ziskov a strát Úč POD 2-01), and notes (Poznámky Úč PODV 3-01); auditor’s report by Kreston Slovakia Audit, s.r.o. (UDVA licence č. 429), signed by Mgr. Zuzana Kováčová (UDVA licence č. 1036), Bratislava, 9 April 2026 (unqualified opinion). Ownership, governance and historical context: Media Development Investment Fund press release of 22 April 2021 announcing Pluralis B.V.’s 34% stake in Petit Press acquired from Penta Investments; Pluralis B.V. corporate material and MDIF launch documentation for the Pluralis vehicle; The Slovak Spectator coverage of the Penta exit (22 April 2021) and of the editor-in-chief succession (11 September 2025); PROXY-FINANCE a.s. corporate site (proxy-finance.cz); Slovak commercial register filings in the Obchodný vestník (29 October 2025) recording the 1 August 2025 cross-border demerger and the registration of Petit Printing Press, a.s. at the Mestský súd v Praze (commercial register entry B 29875). Slovak press freedom context: International Press Institute and Media Freedom Rapid Response reports (February, June and July 2025); Freedom House Freedom in the World 2025 country report for Slovakia; Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025, Slovakia chapter. Exchange rate references: European Central Bank annual average euro foreign-exchange reference rates as published by Deutsche Bundesbank (2024 and 2025); Slovakia is in the euro area and no EUR translation is required.