Postmedia Canada Network, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, is tightening its grip on the industry, buying the Sun Media chain of 175 tabloids and small city dailies, a move that reflects the declining fortunes of the news business.
The Montreal-based broadcasting and publishing company Quebecor acquired and expanded Sun Media through acquisitions, spending about US$1.5 billion over 15 years. On Monday, Postmedia paid about C$301 million (US$275 million) for the group, which includes the Toronto Sun and the London Free Press.
Both firms have been struggling in an increasingly digital world, with Postmedia and Sun Media facing a series of cutbacks and layoffs. Christopher Waddell, a professor of journalism and a former financial journalist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, said that Sun’s smaller dailies, in particular, “are just a shadow of what they used to be.”
With the deal, Postmedia expects to wring out cost savings of C$6 million to C$10 million. Postmedia CEO Paul Godfrey said he had no plans to close or sell any of Sun Media’s papers.
Since emerging from a bankruptcy restructuring four years ago, Postmedia has moved to remake its business, emphasizing its digital operations. After a recent redesign, the Ottawa Citizen has different versions tailored for tablets, smartphones, computer screens and print.
Waddell said that it was unclear how Sun Media advances Postmedia’s strategy since Sun Media has been a relative laggard online. However, Godfrey said that “even if we do nothing at all” the combination of the two companies’ online operations would have a larger number of users than the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corp, the current digital news leader in Canada.
Such an acquisition would have been highly controversial decades ago. In the past, authorities and politicians looked askance at media companies running more than one newspaper in a single city as well as nationwide concentration of ownership.
Postmedia’s own core holdings were created through acquisitions by Conrad Black, who bought up a chain of dailies across the country and then founded the National Post in Toronto. The scope of Black’s newspaper holdings became a highly political issue.
However, this deal may not rankle, even though Postmedia will own both daily newspapers in several Canadian cities, including Ottawa; Edmonton, Alberta; Calgary, Alberta; and Vancouver, British Columbia.
The landscape has changed, Godfrey said, adding that Postmedia and its predecessor companies have been allowed to own and operate both dailies in Vancouver for more than three decades.
“Newspapers are not the chief competitors to each other now,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day