The US and UK’s largest publicly-listed news companies are worth $38bn more today than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic, Press Gazette research has found.
News Corp, the New York Times, Thomson Reuters, Daily Mail publisher DMGT and Mirror group owner Reach are among the companies to have seen their stock market values increase since the end of 2019.
All 16 of the news and information companies examined for Press Gazette’s research have recovered from the depths of the coronavirus crisis, our findings show.
In late December 2019, the combined market capitalisations of the 16 was $251bn (£180bn).
In late March, at the peak of Covid-19 concern, their public values had fallen 28% to $180bn (£129bn).
The market caps total recovered to December 2019 levels in November last year, Press Gazette found.
And, as of this week, the 16 companies are worth a combined $289bn (£208bn) – up $109bn (£78bn) from the depths of the Covid, and $38bn (£27bn) since the end of 2019.
The 16 companies we focus on roughly split into three groups: consumer news publishers, news-focused broadcasters and data/information/events companies. Half of the companies are listed in the US, and the other half are on the London Stock Exchange.
As the table above shows, nine out of the 16 companies are worth more now than they were in late 2019, before the effects of coronavirus were known.
Data company TechTarget has grown the most, with its market capitalisation rocketing 174% to $2bn. The next biggest risers were consumer news companies, with News Corp, Reach and the New York Times jumping 79%, 64% and 51% respectively.
The other companies to have grown their market capitalisations over the period are financial data giant S&P Global (37%), information and news company Thomson Reuters (26%), B2B publisher GlobalData (13%), DMGT (8%) and Relx, the information business formerly known as Reed Elsevier (1%).
British B2B publisher Euromoney led the seven fallers (-23%), ahead of local publishing giant Gannett (-21%), UK broadcaster ITV (-19%), events businesses Informa (-17%) and Ascential (-10%), and US broadcast giants ViacomCBS (-9%) and Fox Corporation (-3%).
Overall, the combined market capitalisations of the 16 companies rose 15% between December 2019 and this Tuesday.
Top photo credit: PETER PARKS/AFP via Getty Images
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