On July 20, we announced an agreement to sell Bonnier Broadcasting – which includes Swedish TV4, C More and Finnish MTV – to Telia Company. With this deal, we will be paid well for a fantastic business, and with a number of results that will make us a stronger company: We will achieve a stable financial foundation, which ensures our long-term success. We will be stronger owners for our current companies and can continue to invest in the development of our historic core within journalism and book publishing. Furthermore, we will gain the financial flexibility to consider bigger investments outside or connected to our current businesses.

During the fall, we’ve restructured Bonnier from a conglomerate into a group of independent companies. As owners, we’re convinced this is the way to create the best possible conditions for the companies’ future development, with decisions, mandates and responsibilities residing closer to the businesses.

This doesn’t mean in any way that we’re suspending our search for synergies, or that we’re going back to a Bonnier that consists of hundreds of small islands. For example, Bonnier News will become a journalistic power center: five to ten years ago, the business area consisted of a number of separate companies with limited or no cooperation. Today, Bonnier News is run by a common executive team, with one CEO for the Swedish news dailies Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Dagens industri and HD-Sydsvenskan. From here on in, Bonnier News will comprise our Swedish journalism business, our Swedish magazines and our international business press.

This is a change of our structure only; in no way does it change our companies’ commercial strategies toward the market. Our focus on developing digital consumer products continues, and we’ve come a long way already. Dagens Nyheter now has more than 150,000 digital subscribers, a number that was zero less than four years ago. Expressen increased its total revenues despite a reduction in print copies, and the total revenues within Bonnier News have increased for the first time in a long while, despite the steep drop in the old print business.

The purpose of the sale of Bonnier Broadcasting and the change in our governance is, from our perspective as owners, to give our businesses the best possible foundation for future development and profitability. We will continue to develop Bonnier as a long-term family-owned group of companies, with a foundation in our historic core, but with the ambition to grow even outside our traditional areas, not least through building on Bonnier Fastigheter’s successes.

We will continue to develop and expand Northern Europe’s most important journalism business, in a time when professional independent journalism is more important than it’s been for a long time.

We will continue to develop Bonnier Books as one of Europe’s leading book publishers.

We are a large group of owners, but we are in total agreement on these goals. The sale of Bonnier Broadcasting will mean smaller revenues in the short run, but I’m convinced that it will provide us with a stable base for our companies’ continued development, for increased profitability for all our companies and, over the long run, for growth.

Carl-Johan Bonnier
Chairman, Albert Bonnier AB