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“They made some really good commercial decisions with their converged products,” said Karen Egan, an analyst at Enders. “But the big strategic question mark — and I think the question mark’s getting bigger every day — is Nexfibre.” She said it would have to speed up its build up from about 100,000 homes a quarter to 300,000 if it is to hit that target without a deal.
“The show’s going to be 35 years old this October and it’s had presenters come and go,” says Alice Enders at Enders Analysis. “The point is that it’s the format that drives the audiences.”
Douglas McCabe, analyst at Enders, said newspaper stewardship “is not the same as widget factory management . . . For some proprietors, influence and relevance are important factors alongside commercial success.”
McCabe added that since 2018 the newspaper had “expressed quality digital publishing nous, with lower story volumes but impressive impact. Its digital subscription model, and product development, have been well executed.”
According to François Godard of the research company Enders Analysis, the landscape has changed quickly.
“Discovery already had sports in Europe and were seeing this as an opportunity to upgrade their business model,” he says. “If you have something high profile like Premier League and Champions League rights you can go direct to consumer [with Discovery+], which is where everyone wanted to go. Now companies like Disney are not only cutting costs on content but they are willing to consider licensing it too. Now you must look at [the content it will get from] BT Sport alone: does it make sense and how can it make a profit? It’s not that it’s impossible but it’s something that’s long term and it will depend a lot on relationships with third parties, like Sky, selling it to consumers for you.”
On behalf of Lloyds Banking Group, AlixPartners seized the press assets of the Barclay family to recover debts, threatening to sell the Telegraph Media Group and the Spectator in a range of £500 to £600 million.
The least likely scenario is for AlixPartners to select another national news group as the buyer of the Telegraph, due to barriers to clearance from public interest considerations and possibly also at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
If AlixPartners considers that UK trade buyers are unlikely to be considered suitable buyers for the Telegraph, then the range of buyers reduces to non-UK trade buyers or wealthy individuals seeking a trophy asset.
Possible buyers range from very wealthy individuals seeking a trophy asset to media businesses looking for something more strategic. “I wouldn’t rule anyone out,” Douglas McCabe, media analyst at Enders, said.
