WHO ARE INVOLVED?

Telegraaf
The largest national daily newspaper is by far the Telegraaf, which has a circulation of more than 765 thousend copies. The Telegraaf is produced by a publisher of the same name, which has a notation on Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange.The Telegraaf publishes, next to the nation-wide distributed Telegraaf, also a number of regional daily papers with a combined circulation of more than 540 thousand copies.

The corporation is as a newspaper publisher considered to be very profitable, especially compared to most other publishing companies in the world. This has been the situation for many years and the financial position is as such very solid. The sometimes very extensive investments in new lay out and printing techniques as well as acquisitions are normally financed by its own assets. The year 2002 was the second more difficult year for the Telegraaf. Lower operational profits and provisions for restructuring charges and goodwill caused a loss of € 4.9 million.

PCM
The second large producer of national daily newspapers is PCM (Pers Combinatie Meulenhof). PCM publishes four national daily newspapers. The largest of those is the Volkskrant, with approximately 290 thousand copies. Second is the Algemeen Dagblad, with around 277 thousand copies. Next to that there is the NRC Handelsblad, with nearly 238 thousand copies, and finally the Trouw, which has a circulation of around 96 thousand copies.
PCM also published the Parool, a daily paper that focuses on Amsterdam and surrounding areas. The Parool has left PCM at the end of 2002. Shareholders now are the Belgium-bases Vlaamse Persgroep, the Stichting Het Parool, some other companies and members of the staff.

PCM acquired the Algemeen Dagblad and the NRC Handelsblad from Reed Elsevier a few years ago. The concern had to incur large debts for this acquisition. Partly because of this there has, up to now, not been enough financial backing for drastic technical improvements, including a far-reaching integration of the technical equipment used by the four titles. However, PCM was also a profitable newspaper publisher, but is also hit by the poor economic situation on the advertising market.

Shares of PCM are not traded publicly. The largest part of the share capital (65%) is in the hands of the foundations that used to own the Volkskrant, the Trouw and the Parool in the past. The transaction with Reed Elsevier meant that new shares had to be issued to external investors (35%). The ING Group is especially important in this perspective.

Financieele Dagblad
The Netherlands know, next to the Telegraaf and PCM, a third publisher with a daily newspaper: the Financieele Dagblad BV, publisher of a daily paper bearing the same name. This national newspaper currently has a circulation of 51 thousand copies, a small number compared to the other national newspapers. However, the paper is specialised in the financial-economic area, like the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and has therefor by definition a smaller market area. A relatively large number of its readers are bankers, managers of large corporations and politicians.

The shares of the Financieele Dagblad are for an important part owned by an external investment company, which factually only operates outside the world of daily newspapers. The rest of the shares are in the hands of the employees of the publisher.

Wegener
Wegener takes up a final important position on the Dutch market for daily papers. This is by far the biggest publisher of regional dailies in the Netherlands with, although divided over a large number of titles, a total of 1.3 million copies. The different titles make use of the same technical facilities and in some areas also of the same editorial expertise, mainly in specialised fields such as national financial reports on corporations and stock markets. Wegener is also a profitable newspaper publisher. Its shares are traded on Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange. Fellow publisher the Telegraaf holds a minority stake of around 20 percent in Wegener shares.

Other Media
Various other kinds of media which, next to daily newspapers, pay attention to the financial news and the news surrounding stock markets, have started to develop especially since investing in shares and options has also become popular in the Netherlands. There are, for example, many television and radio stations with a regular feature in this area, and there is much to be found on the Internet. Different weekly magazines that specialise in investment opinions have been around for somewhat longer.

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