SPH's digital newspapers hit one-third of paper-based circulation
Daily paper circulation slumped below 1m copies.
According to Maybank Kim Eng, they understand from the management that daily paper-based circulation has dropped below 1m copies now but the digital subscription increased very fast and managed to cover the shortfall.
Now the digital circulation for certain English newspapers such as The Straits Times has accounted for 1/3 of paper-based circulation.
Here's more from Maybank Kim Eng:
SPH offers two options of digital subscriptions: native iPad version with less ads and PDF version with equal amount of ads as paper-based.
The profitability would not be much affected because most of the subscriber chose to read PDF version according to management. In fact we believe that SPH can even save on printing cost as more readers move to digital subscription.