Don’t shrug off the significance of SPH’s falling newspaper readership

SINGAPORE (Oct 7): UBS Global Research is warning that investors are not seeing the reality of Singapore Press Holdings’ business when buying the publisher based on its yields.

In a note on Thursday, lead analyst Rachael Tan explained that 55% of Singapore’s population reads print newspapers on a daily basis, compared with the 68% in 2012, according to the Nielsen Singapore Media Index Report. At the same time, the combined readership of newspapers for both digital and print fell to 62% in 2015, from 75% in 2012.

UBS’s own weekly Saturday Straits Times page tracker also pointed to similar trends of low double-digit y-o-y declines in average page count for 4Q16 and the month of September.

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