German media group Axel Springer has agreed to buy the owner of Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper for 575 million pounds ($766 million), the companies announced Friday.
The agreement ends a long saga over ownership of the Telegraph Media Group, which publishes the 171-year-old, conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph, its Sunday sister paper and the Telegraph news website.
Berlin-based Axel Springer said it will invest in the group “to enable it to become the leading center-right media outlet in the English-speaking world” and “turbocharge” expansion into the U.S. market.
The German company owns titles including the Bild and Welt newspapers, Business Insider and the political information group Politico. It has made previous attempts to enter the British market, with unsuccessful bids for the Telegraph in 2004 and the Financial Times in 2015.
“More than 20 years ago, we tried to acquire The Telegraph and did not succeed. Now our dream comes true,” Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner said.
The agreement follows years of uncertainty over the Telegraph titles’ future and scuttles a bid by the owner of the Daily Mail, a rival right-of-center newspaper.
The Telegraph group, previously owned by Britain’s Barclay family, was put up for sale in 2023 to help pay off the family’s debts. There was an offer to buy the publications from RedBird IMI, a consortium backed by RedBird Capital Partners and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family and the vice president of the United Arab Emirates.
The consortium pulled out in 2024 following strong opposition from the U.K. government, which launched legislation to block foreign state ownership of the British press.
Daily Mail and General Trust, which owns the right-of-center Daily Mail, later made a 500 million-pound offer, but earlier this year the government ordered it be investigated over concerns about the purchase’s impact on competition and the “plurality of views” in Britain’s media.
The failed suitor criticized a “protracted and out-of-date regulatory framework” for sinking its bid, but said “we wish every success to Axel Springer and the Telegraph.”
Conservative news magazine The Spectator, previously part of the Telegraph group, was sold separately in 2024 to British hedge fund investor Paul Marshall.
