The New York Times Company announced on 1 November 2018 that it has surpassed 4 million subscriptions in total – from a figure of 3.8 million total subscriptions reported in August 2018. Its digital subscribers have now surpassed the 3 million mark with the net addition of 203,000 in the third quarter of 2018. However, not all of these additional digital subscribers are for news – with 60,000 subscriptions added for the company’s cooking and crossword features that are sold separately.
The gain in Q3 of 2018 is the largest increase in digital subscriptions in any quarter since the so-called Trump bump in the last quarter of 2016 and the first quarter of 2017 at the peak of the last US presidential election cycle. Trump won his 4-year term in November 2016 and was inaugurated as the president in January 2017.
The company has continued to be profitable with net income at US$ 23.6 million (approximately Rs. 170 crore), which represents a drop from Q3 of 2017 when its net income included a one-time gain from the sale of a dam owned by a paper mill in which the company is an investor. However, operating profits have risen by 10% to US$ 41.63 million in Q3 of 2018 in comparison to Q3 2017. Revenue has benefitted this year with the NY Times company’s renovation and leasing out four floors of its building near Times Square.
The Covid-19 pandemic led to the country-wide lockdown on 25 March 2020. It will be two years tomorrow as I write this. What have we learned in this time? Maybe the meaning of resilience since small companies like us have had to rely on our resources and the forbearance of our employees as we have struggled to produce our trade platforms.
The print and packaging industries have been fortunate, although the commercial printing industry is still to recover. We have learned more about the digital transformation that affects commercial printing and packaging. Ultimately digital will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future.
Web analytics show that we now have readership in North America and Europe amongst the 90 countries where our five platforms reach. Our traffic which more than doubled in 2020, has at times gone up by another 50% in 2021. And advertising which had fallen to pieces in 2020 and 2021, has started its return since January 2022.
As the economy approaches real growth with unevenness and shortages a given, we are looking forward to the PrintPack India exhibition in Greater Noida. We are again appointed to produce the Show Daily on all five days of the show from 26 to 30 May 2022.
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– Naresh Khanna
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