”We had a solid third quarter in both Learning and Media Finland, which – combined with our good performance during the first half of the year – led to improved operational EBIT excl. PPA and increased free cash flow for January–September.

The third quarter is always the important high season in Learning. As we had indicated earlier, the last year of the lower cycle in Spain and Poland was more than offset by growth in our other learning content businesses, especially in the Netherlands. The growth was driven by the successful introductions of new blended learning materials across all our markets. As an example, in Poland we launched SMARTbook that combines textbook, workbook, notes, exercises and multimedia in one format. And in the Netherlands, our renewed blended learning content for early literacy education, Lijn3, is used daily by students and teachers in approx. 2,000 schools.

Overall, Learning’s net sales declined slightly due to the planned discontinuation of low-value distribution contracts in the Netherlands, while the cost base improved as we continued to see the positive impacts of Program Solar. Together with the higher share of learning content sales and a more digital sales mix, this improved Learning’s operational earnings.

The use of AI is an increasingly integral part of the way we work in both our businesses, always with a strong emphasis on its responsible use and human oversight. Across Learning, we see great opportunities for AI to enhance the way we support teachers and to significantly improve personalised learning for students. One recent example of this is an AI toolkit for teachers within the itslearning platform, which is now being piloted across several schools. We also continue with the roll-out of Speech Coach, an AI tool that helps students to practise their pronunciation in a foreign language, which has recently been made available to schools and students in Finland. In Media Finland, we are for example piloting a new version of a news gathering automation tool, where AI recognises potential news topics. The target is that AI assisted news gathering can significantly help in quick news situations and in daily newsroom work. To enhance efficiency in our operations, we scaled different content creation initiatives, leveraging AI for editorial work in a way fully controlled by our publishing experts.

In Media Finland, subscription sales continued to grow driven by good development of the SVOD service Ruutu+ that demonstrates our attractive entertainment and sports content. As we expected after the first half of the year, the softness in the Finnish advertising market continued in the third quarter, while we continue to expect the advertising market to be relatively stable for the full year. Our advertising sales continued to decrease, mainly driven by lower TV advertising due to ending the reselling of a third-party TV channel advertising at the beginning of the year. Media Finland’s operational earnings improved as growth in digital subscription sales, together with continued cost containment, more than offset the impact of the lower advertising sales.

Our free cash flow increased as a result of higher earnings and lower financing costs, and we expect the free cash flow for the full-year 2025 to increase further compared to the previous year. The deleveraging of our balance sheet continued to progress well. Supported by the typical annual seasonality of the learning business, our leverage improved both compared to the previous year and the end of June, and Net debt / Adjusted EBITDA amounted to 2.0 (2024: 2.4) at the end of September.

During the third quarter, we made two important, yet difficult, decisions that strengthen the foundation for our future growth and the resulting impairments were booked in this quarter. In Learning, we are adjusting to changing market demand for distribution services from schools and we will not be participating in multi-year distribution tenders in the Dutch market this year. The decision is expected to reduce our Dutch distribution net sales by around 40m€ with no earnings impact, therefore improving Learning’s expected operational EBIT margin excl. PPA clearly above 23% in 2026.

In Media Finland, we are planning to centralise our news media printing operations to the Helsinki area and close the Tampere printing plant. This plan is based on the accelerating shift of media consumption towards digital channels, and supports our well-established practices for continuous efficiency improvements to mitigate the impacts of lower print revenues and cost inflation.

Following our solid performance in January–September, we have narrowed our Outlook for 2025, with the operational profit excl. PPA outlook now being at the higher end of the original range.

We have made good progress during the past two years in increasing our profitability and free cash flow and strengthening our balance sheet. Looking ahead, curriculum renewals in our major learning markets, particularly Poland and Spain, are expected to accelerate our organic net sales growth from 2026 onwards. In Media Finland, we are continuing, and accelerating, our successful digital transformation. We also aim to expand through value-creating M&A in K12 learning services, while being committed to meeting our leverage and equity ratio targets and paying an increasing dividend, equal to 40–60% of our annual free cash flow. We are hosting a Capital Markets Day on 25 November 2025 to elaborate more on our growth path 2026–2030 (more information at Sanoma.com).

I would like to extend my warmest thanks to all Sanoma employees for their strong commitment and dedication in serving our customers and delivering these solid results.”

30 October 2025