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 and its Sunday sister paper.
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.
“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 German company owns titles including the Bild and Welt newspapers and the political information group Politico.
The agreement follows years of uncertainty over the papers' future and scuttles a rival bid by the owner of the Daily Mail to buy the Telegraph titles.
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.
The owner of 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.
Right-leaning news magazine The Spectator, previously part of the Telegraph group, was sold separately in 2024 to British hedge fund investor Paul Marshall.
