NGN Limited, The Sun’s parent company, has filed their accounts. The highlights are:

• Turnover was down £6 million (2%) from £324 million to £318 million
• EBITDA was up from £2.2 million to £12.9 million
• Total brand reach was up from 36 million to 38 million
• Losses fell overall from £201 million to £51 million, of which £49 million was due to ongoing legal costs

By Guido’s calculations that means the newspaper made a loss of some £2 million before paying the legacy legal bills…

The Sun’s editor Victoria Newton has emailed staff with her take on the results:

Our EBITDA (our earnings before Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation) reported a profit of £13m, an increase of £11million on the year before, which is especially positive considering the impact of another challenging year for newspapers.

Part of the way we report our accounts and the methodology used means the EBITDA figure isn’t usually reported by financial or media journalists.

We have had a brilliant year as we continued to increase our investment in digital, increasing our presence in the US to become one of the fastest growing sites there and reaching huge digital audiences both there and in the UK.

We are still the number one newsbrand in Britain reaching 28.7M people per month, according to industry standard PAMCo measurements, and in 2021 we continued to set the news agenda – winning Scoop of the Year for our Matt Hancock story – and kept our readers well-informed about covid and now the war in the Ukraine through our brave and brilliant reporters and photographers on the ground there.

News Corp recently announced earnings for Q2 2022 showing the business had its most profitable quarter ever. Within that we also reported the growth of The Sun online, with 163 million global monthly unique users in December 2021, compared to 130 million in 2020, by our own internal metrics.

News Media at News Corp globally had a particularly strong quarter with segment EBITDA up 68 per cent. That outstanding performance reflected growth in advertising, the benefits of the deals with the Big Tech platforms, sensible sustained cost discipline, and the benefit of savvy product and technology investments made in recent years.

The robust advertising results, up 17 per cent in the quarter, were evident at all major mastheads across both print and digital. Our digital trends also showed the value of our global network and improvements in our understanding of permission data.

Whilst NGN reported losses, they were heavily reduced from £201M in 2020 to £50M in 2021, with £49m of the latter amount attributable to civil litigation from the closure of The News of The World [which are in turn, indemnified by Fox Corp].

We recently announced the restructure of the business with Dom Carter now EVP, Publisher of The Sun, bringing his commercial background to drive The Sun forward as a digital advertising powerhouse. Dom will come and talk to us all soon about his plans for the year ahead.

Thank you all, as always, for your continued hard work and dedication.