According to today’s ‘Gazeta Prawna” daily, the new national newspaper project by PolskaPresse, on the back its local dailies over the half of Poland’s territory, faced problems in negotiations with the owner of local dailies in the other half, Mecom. Mecom is said to be considering selling its newspaper portfolio, and apparently is unwilling to enter any commitments on long term cooperation.
Our view: We would expect a slightly positive impact of the news today. As we wrote before, the launch of the new national newspaper is bound to face numerous obstacles. Perhaps, Polkapresse buying Mecom’s newspaper portfolio would be a solution to one of them. However, we have not seen an indication of that becoming true as yet. We reiterate our Hold rating for the stock.