Večer Mediji

Večer Mediji, the Maribor-based publisher of Slovenia’s oldest post-war daily Večer and one of the country’s three main general-news newspapers, reported net sales of €6.49 million in 2025, down 8.3% on 2024, and a net profit of €108,460, down 4.7%. The headline number, though, is not the profit, but the headcount: the company’s average number of employees (full-time equivalent) fell from 73.4 in 2024 to 61.4 in 2025, a 16.4% cut in a single year, a very large reduction in the two-year comparison disclosed in the 2025 filing. Labour costs followed the staff out the door, dropping 14.5% to €2.47 million. That is how Večer Mediji, on shrinking revenue, kept its margin intact: it took €419,000 out of its payroll. Cash on the balance sheet collapsed from €66,000 at the end of 2024 to €21,500 at the end of 2025, a 67% drop, and the company reported €63,561 of long-term financial liabilities at year-end 2025, compared with none a year earlier. The current liquidity ratio improved to 0.85 from 0.66 but remains below the 1.0 threshold at which short-term assets cover short-term obligations.

Večer Mediji is profitable, but is not investing in journalism. Instead, it is shrinking.

Večer Mediji: key financial indicators 2024–2025

Source: Večer Mediji, časopisno založniško podjetje d.o.o., financial statements for 2025 filed with the Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for Public Legal Records and Related Services (AJPES). Tax ID: 6740022000. Currency: EUR.

Večer Mediji has been controlled since September 2021 by a network of six companies linked to Slovenian businessman Martin Odlazek and his family: Svet24 Informativne vsebine d.o.o., AM Marketing d.o.o., Kuster naložbe d.o.o., PT Trade d.o.o., Salomon d.o.o. and Curator Nova d.o.o. Each holds a stake of just under 20%, a structure that critics, including the Slovenian Association of Journalists (DNS), have described as designed to stay under the threshold above which Slovenia’s Media Act requires prior consent from the Ministry of Culture for an ownership change. Odlazek, who built his business empire from the Salomon classifieds magazine and a waste-management group, also controls Primorske novice, Dolenjski list, the weekly Reporter and a network of magazines and radio stations. Across this group, his family is estimated by Slovenian media researchers to be linked to more than sixty different media outlets. The previous owners, Uroš Hakl and Sašo Todorović, had themselves acquired Večer in 2014 from the larger publisher Delo after the Slovenian Competition Protection Agency ordered Delo to divest, and they had already sold Večer‘s magazine portfolio to Odlazek in 2019.

The Slovenian print market itself is small, concentrated and structurally shrinking. There are three main general-information daily newspapers (Delo, Dnevnik and Večer) and a planned 2018–2020 merger between Dnevnik and Večer, approved by the Competition Protection Agency despite the resulting 40% share of the print advertising market, ultimately fell apart. Večer remains the leading newspaper in north-eastern Slovenia and the country’s oldest continuously published post-war daily, traceable to Vestnik, first issued on 9 May 1945. On 31 December 2024 the Slovenian government approved the proposal for a new Media Act, the first comprehensive overhaul of the country’s media legislation in more than twenty years, and sent it to the National Assembly. On 17 December 2025 the government adopted the implementing decree, providing €5 million per year in state aid, including subsidies for journalists’ jobs, digital subscriptions and print distribution in less densely populated areas. The journalists’ union has welcomed the framework but warned that the aid arrives in 2026, too late for the staffing decisions already made in 2025.

Večer Mediji: asset map

Signals

Revenue has fallen, but profit has held: because of layoffs, not growth

Net sales dropped 8.3% in 2025, from €7.08 million to €6.49 million, an absolute fall of nearly €600,000. Total operating income (net sales plus other operating revenue) fell 6.4%, cushioned by a €132,000 increase in non-sales operating revenue, the source of which is not disclosed in the filing. To preserve a near-identical net profit on shrinking revenue, the company cut where it could: payroll. Labour costs fell from €2.89 million to €2.47 million, a €419,000 saving. That cut is what kept the bottom line stable. EBITDA was almost flat (€225,900 → €222,400) and EBIT slipped only marginally (€131,000 → €123,800). On the face of the income statement, this is a stable year. Read alongside the headcount line, it is a year in which the company stopped producing as much journalism as it did the year before.

The headcount cut is the largest in the published five-year series

Večer Mediji’s average full-time-equivalent headcount fell from 73.4 in 2024 to 61.4 in 2025. That is a 16.4% reduction in a single year, removing 12 full-time equivalents from a small company. The journalists’ organisations have documented the specific cuts: in March 2025, the management dismissed four senior journalists and editors, including Rok Kajzer (the editor of the Saturday supplement V soboto), Zoran Mijatović, Jasmina Detela and Boris Jauševec, and dissolved the independent editorial desk of V soboto itself. The Slovenian Association of Journalists, the Trade Union of Slovenian Journalists, the Workers’ Council of Večer and the editorial representation jointly condemned the decision, describing it as a “degradation of the journalistic profession” and calling for an immediate review. The Trade Union of Večer Journalists had publicly stated in February 2025 that the editorial staff had already fallen from 80 to 67 in the previous year. Kajzer, in an interview with public broadcaster RTV Slovenija after his dismissal, called the move a “ball-less campaign of revenge” and said three further dismissals were already planned. None of this is visible in the financial filing, which discloses only the average FTE figure. The trajectory it implies, a newsroom losing roughly 10–15% of its staff every year, is what makes the 2025 financial result possible.

Cash is almost gone, and the company has taken on new long-term debt

The most striking single line in the 2025 balance sheet is cash: €21,571 at year-end, down from €66,117 a year earlier, a 67% drop. For a company with €6.5 million in revenue, that is effectively no cash buffer at all. At the same time, Večer Mediji reported €63,561 of long-term financial liabilities at year-end 2025, compared with none at year-end 2024. The current liquidity ratio improved from 0.66 to 0.85, but remains below the 1.0 threshold at which a company’s short-term assets are sufficient to cover its short-term obligations. Short-term operating liabilities of €951,000 exceed short-term operating receivables of €786,000, suggesting continued pressure on working capital; the filing does not disclose enough detail to identify these liabilities specifically as supplier stretch. Equity, by contrast, rose 4.5% to €2.49 million, entirely through the addition of 2025 profit to legal reserves. Almost 69% of the company’s total assets are intangible assets (€2.42 million); the filing itself does not identify their composition, so any interpretation as acquisition-related goodwill from the 2021 ownership change would need confirmation from the notes to the accounts. If those intangibles were impaired, the equity picture would change very quickly.

Editorial independence has been a live, public issue since the 2021 sale

The Odlazek acquisition in mid-2021 set off a sequence of public disputes that has not closed. In December 2022, the company announced it would move Večer‘s editorial offices from its long-time headquarters on Svetozarevska (later Slovenska) street in central Maribor, sold off by the previous owners just before the 2021 sale, into Galerija Gosposka, a building owned by Maribor’s then-mayor Saša Arsenovič. The company’s official registered address moved to Ljubljana, with most staff remaining in rented Maribor offices. Journalists from across Slovenia, along with academics and media-freedom organisations, protested that locating Večer in offices owned by a sitting elected official, whose work the paper was expected to cover, was a structural conflict of interest. The management, led by director Miha Klančar, said the editorial team would remain “completely autonomous and independent” and that the savings from the move would be reinvested in the newsroom. In July 2025, Klančar took on a second role, becoming editor-in-chief of Večer itself, on top of his role as managing director. The editorial staff was invited to give a non-binding opinion: 60% of the 30 newsroom members who voted opposed his appointment. The previous editor-in-chief, Matija Stepišnik, was re-appointed responsible editor with 83% newsroom support. The journalists’ union has also flagged that Večer still does not have a company-level collective agreement, despite repeated requests.

A digital pivot is happening, with limited reader-pay headroom

Like most European print publishers, Večer Mediji has been pushing into reader-paid digital. The company has rebuilt its newsroom workflow so that most articles now appear first on vecer.com, often paywalled, with editors selecting from the digital output for the next day’s print edition based partly on online readership. Klančar said in 2024 that digital subscriptions had roughly doubled in the previous year, although the absolute base is not disclosed. The macro headwind is severe.

What to watch in 2026

The key question is whether the 2025 financial result, achieved by cutting twelve full-time-equivalent positions out of seventy-three, is the bottom or a midpoint. Three things will shape the 2026 reading.

First, whether the headcount stabilises. A newsroom that has lost roughly a sixth of its staff in one year, on top of earlier cuts, cannot keep cutting indefinitely without changing the product. The 2025 financial result depends on the cuts having happened; the 2026 result will depend on whether the smaller team can hold revenue at the new, lower level. If revenue keeps falling at 8% a year without a further payroll cut, the margin disappears.

Second, the new state aid scheme. The implementing decree adopted on 17 December 2025 makes Slovenian print publishers eligible for distribution subsidies, digital-subscription subsidies and journalist-employment subsidies from 2026 onwards, drawn from a €5 million annual budget. Whether Večer Mediji applies, qualifies and receives meaningful sums will be visible in the 2026 accounts.

Third, the ownership question. The six-company Odlazek-linked structure, with each shareholder just below the 20% threshold that triggers ministerial review, has now been in place for over four years. The management has stated publicly that owners do not interfere in editorial policy; the journalists’ union has repeatedly contested that, most recently over the dismissal of V soboto‘s editor in March 2025. Slovenia’s new Media Act introduces stronger transparency requirements on media ownership, and the European Media Freedom Act has been in force since August 2025. Whether either framework changes how the ownership of one of Slovenia’s three main daily newspapers is actually disclosed or scrutinised, rather than merely described, is one of the larger structural questions left open by the 2025 filing.

What the 2025 numbers show clearly enough is that Slovenia’s oldest post-war daily, eighty years after its founding, is being kept profitable by becoming smaller every year.