Most national daily newspapers, including “MO12345LEMONDE”, will increase their prices on January 1, 2023.
By Brice Laemle
In newsstands, the newspapers of the national daily press (PQN) will cost more early January 2023. It will be necessary to pay 20 more cents to buy the paper edition of Figaro, Echos or even the world, which will progress at 3 , 40 euros. The cross and liberation will increase respectively by 30 and 20 cents respectively, to reach 2.70 euros. As for the team, the newspaper will be sold 10 cents more expensive (2.30 euros per week and 3.30 euros on Saturday with the magazine), from January 2.
If the price increases are recurrent at the start of the year in the press, the publishers justify this one by the explosion of the costs of newspaper and, more broadly, production costs. The price of paper per tonne was 400 euros in the first quarter of 2021, a historically low price. Today he reaches 900 euros, after having even climbed up to 1,100 euros in November.
This increase is linked to the consequences of the war in Ukraine and the rise in energy costs, but not only. “Papers reorient their investments towards cardboard packaging, because it is a very dynamic market, with e-commerce for example, but this is done to the detriment of the production of newspaper”, estimates Pierre Petillault, the Director General of the Alliance of the General Information Press. For the information press, the additional cost linked to the increase in the price of paper is estimated at 150 million euros in 2022, according to Mr. Petillault. “It is probably even much more by taking into account all magazines,” he deplores.
“We reduced our pagination by almost 20 %”
The regional daily press (PQR), whose economic model is still essentially based on paper sales, is all the more harshly struck by this leap in costs. For the EBRA group – owner of the Dauphiné Libéré, Progress and the latest news from Alsace – which had managed to return to balance in 2021, the additional cost is estimated at 15 million euros in 2022. This strikes the accounts of the company which, once closed, could total ten million euros in operating losses.
“To consume paper less, we have reduced our pagination by almost 20 %”, explains Rémy Ramstein, industrial director of Ebra, judging that this new period of crisis in a market already weakened by the drop in sales in Kiosks and the increase in carrying costs “[accelerated] all the more the transition to digital”. Pending this rocking, which will be difficult as the PQR readership is attached to paper format, seven of the press group’s nine newspapers will increase by ten cents on January 1.
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