Strategic Intelligence: Publishing Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

Strategic Intelligence: Publishing Sector Scorecard Q1 2025 Update

Summary

The publishing sector must navigate a turbulent landscape after the imposition of Trump’s tariffs in Q1 2025. Although books and print media are exempt from the latest round of tariffs, the industry will remain wary of volatile trade policy and will likely still suffer from the wider macroeconomic impact. An existing 7.5% tariff on books imported to the US from China will persist. Imports of paper and pulp from Mexico and Canada have been exempted under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), but other sources will remain vulnerable. As such, the US publishing sector should expect higher costs from materials like paper and ink.

Digital publishers, while less reliant on physical materials, will still be impacted by US tariffs. The general economic slump expected to take hold will heavily impact those relying on advertising for revenue. Fluctuations in fuel prices will also impact shipping costs, disrupting publishing worldwide.

Despite these changes to the global macroeconomic landscape, the publishing sector continues to innovate. The New York Times has incorporated AI into many business processes within the newsroom, while the Guardian Media Group announced a partnership with OpenAI in Q1 2025. Business intelligence platform Clarivate has also invested in its digital media offering, improving its search function with AI. Comparatively strong positions in AI and digital media gave driven digital publishers Bloomberg and S&P Global into the top five of the publishing sector scorecard’s thematic screen.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the publishing sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• GlobalData’s thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition, and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• At GlobalData, we have developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• Our thematic engine tags over 180 million data items across six alternative data sets—patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news—to themes. The vast datasets within our thematic engine help our analysts to produce sector scorecards that identify the companies best placed to succeed in a future filled with multiple disruptive threats.