Condé Nast UK profits fall 36% as sale of Vogue publisher ruled out
Condé Nast's UK pre-tax profits excluding exceptional items fell 36%, from £28m in 2024 to nearly £18m last year, as revenues dipped and Steven Newhouse, chair of controlling shareholder Advance, ruled out a sale of the publisher.
Condé Nast UK profits fall 36% as sale of Vogue publisher ruled out
Condé Nast's UK pre-tax profits excluding exceptional items dropped by more than a third, newly filed accounts show, even as the company's chair of its controlling shareholder moved to shut down talk of a sale of the Vogue publisher.
UK revenues and the Vogue House effect
Profits excluding exceptional items fell 36%, from £28m in 2024 to nearly £18m last year. Revenues generated in the UK fell 7%, from £75.9m to £70.6m. An 18% rise in international revenues, to £29.7m, kept total revenues almost flat at £100m.
The accounts also sit against a one-off boost the year before:
- In 2024 the company booked £64m in proceeds from selling its London headquarters, Vogue House.
- A publisher spokesperson said the profit change reflected planned investment in customised client solutions.
- The spokesperson also cited changes to pension scheme projections and wage inflation as affecting this year's profit.
Restructuring costs and staffing
Restructuring costs more than doubled year on year, from £1.9m to £4.3m, which Condé Nast attributed primarily to severance costs. Staff numbers dipped from 466 to 461 between 2024 and last year.
The spokesperson said there were no large restructures in the UK business in 2025, only isolated redundancies, with hiring continuing.
Sale ruled out after Roger Lynch exit
Steven Newhouse, chair of Advance, the Newhouse family holding company that controls Condé Nast, ruled out a sale of the publisher. Speculation had linked Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, with a possible purchase of the business. Newhouse's comments came after the abrupt departure of chief executive Roger Lynch, hired in 2019 to turn the business around, who left to become boss of the toymaker Mattel.
Newhouse told the Financial Times: "Maybe for a certain class of non-media owner, there's a prestige to owning media properties." He added: "But we've been a media owner for 100 years. So we're not in it for the glamour."
The wider picture
The results land amid broader pressures on magazine publishing. Earlier this year Lynch called Google's AI Summaries "another sort of death blow" to traditional online search-driven traffic, saying Google searches were no longer a meaningful driver and accounted for only about a quarter of visits to Condé Nast's websites last year.
Other details from the accounts:
- Seven of the company's largest brands - Vogue, GQ, the New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and Condé Nast Traveler - account for 85% of global revenues.
- Newsstand sales and other subscriptions make up about 14% of total revenues, with advertising and other services about 86%.
- The highest-paid director, Natalia Gamero del Castillo Calleja, took home more than £1.3m; she resigned last August as the most senior executive outside the US.
- Earlier this year Condé Nast announced plans to close Self, its women's health magazine, after 47 years.
A publisher spokesperson said there were no large restructures in the UK business in 2025, only isolated redundancies, with hiring continuing.
