The Last Big Print Bet

Today, the 10th of March 2026, it was reported that Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development S.A. had agreed to sell its entire shareholding in NPRT Holdings Africa Limited to Taarifa Limited, owned by Tanzanian Business Magnate Rostam Aziz. The holding company owns 54.08% of Nation Media Group (NMG). After 66 years of stewardship, the deal would end the Aga Khan era — pending regulatory approvals expected in “three to four months.”

That ownership transition is the news hook. But it is not the beginning of the story; it is the consequence of a long chain of choices. For more than a decade, NMG tried to straddle two worlds: the high-margin, print-led model that built its dominance, and the digital ecosystem that steadily hollowed out print economics. This series argues that the “death” here is not literal. It is the slow collapse of a legacy business model — accelerated by strategic bets, delayed platform investment, and governance instincts that repeatedly treated digital as an add-on rather than the core.

This first installment investigates one pivotal moment: the decision to invest heavily in print capacity in 2015–2016 — just as the market was making a decisive move toward mobile, social distribution, and platform advertising.

Peak confidence, early cracks

In 2015, NMG still looked like a formidable cash generator. In its 2015 annual report, the company presented a five-year summary that shows turnover rising to 13.374 billion shillings in 2013 and holding at 13.351 billion in 2014, before slipping to 12.340 billion in 2015. Profit before tax followed a similar arc: 3.587 billion (2013), 3.624 billion (2014), then 2.823 billion (2015).

Capital expenditure was rising again too — 1.004 billion shillings recorded for 2015 in the same “performance highlights” section, even as dividends per share were held at 10 shillings through 2012–2015.

But the same annual report also contains the warning signs management could already see. The chairman’s statement describes a year “adversely affected” by reduced advertising revenue and currency depreciation, among other pressures — signals of tightening profitability in the core print economics.

The key point is not that NMG suddenly became weak in 2015. It is that the company was already at an inflection point where legacy strengths (scale printing + mass advertising) were beginning to encounter a new reality: price-sensitive readers, more measurable digital advertising, and the rise of global distribution platforms.

The VAT shock that changed the price of the paper

One early shock came from policy rather than product.

Kenya’s Value Added Tax Act was assented to in August 2013 and commenced on September 1, 2013. When the law took effect, newspapers that had been exempt were swept into a new economic regime. Within days, Kenyan business press reported that major titles announced a cover price increase, with the Daily Nation and The Standard moving from KSh 50 to KSh 60 — a 20% jump.

A year later, an economic survey story carried by a regional media industry site summarized the messy impact: English paper circulation dropped by millions of copies and Swahili circulation declined, with the VAT-driven price increase cited as a contributor — alongside people choosing to read online instead of buying hard copies.

VAT did not “kill” NMG by itself. But it made something suddenly visible: the print business was vulnerable to small price shocks because the marginal reader — the casual buyer at a kiosk — was already drifting. In hindsight, VAT was a stress test, and the results hinted that the market was already preparing to move.

“Digital content company” — and a print-first capital bet

Here is the contradiction at the center of the story.

In the same 2015 annual report, the CEO is quoted acknowledging “consumer changing trends” and the need to transform “from a legacy newspaper publisher, into a modern digital content company.” That is a clear strategic diagnosis — and one that, on paper, aligns with what global media companies were already doing.

But just a page later in the report’s business review, NMG states something equally clear: “print media, which remains the core of our business,” would continue to play “a significant role for many years to come.” It is “against this background” that the company says it made a “significant” 2 billion shilling investment in a new state-of-the-art printing press.

The report frames the press investment not as a holdover from the past, but as a rational, future-oriented move. It points to print advertising formats, improved pagination/colour capacity, and the ability to produce regional editions and deliver on time.

This is what makes 2015 so consequential. NMG did not merely fail to do digital; it actively reaffirmed print as “core” at precisely the moment when the best evidence globally suggested print economics were structurally weakening.

The press that was “future-proof”

NMG’s own publishing — both corporate and editorial — documents how the press was sold internally and publicly.

The 2015 annual report states the new press “went into production on 7th December, 2015” and was “officially commissioned on 17th March 2016.” It details the commissioning event, noting the founder (the Aga Khan) and senior government officials present, and frames the press as an upgrade that would improve advertising revenue and reader experience.

In a separate NMG corporate-news feature (published in 2017 but describing the 2016 commissioning), the company offers even more detail. It describes the new plant footprint, the German manufacturer (Manroland), and a “future-proof” design philosophy. It cites the press capability — up to 86,000 copies per hour — and quotes production leadership saying production time was cut by 65%, saving operating hours and reducing wastage by enough to save about Sh8 million annually. It also notes paper-size adjustments translating into savings of more than Sh35 million annually.

From a pure operations point of view, the investment could be defended. A more efficient press lowers unit costs, improves colour quality, and creates premium print inventory for advertisers. NMG’s own narrative emphasizes those benefits repeatedly.

But the strategic question is different: even with a more efficient press, was the market for printed advertising and printed readership large enough — and durable enough — to justify a 2 billion shilling capex bet during a period of accelerating digital substitution?

What the outside world was signaling

To judge the press decision fairly, you have to place it in its information environment.

Global research available by 2015 was already pointing to mobile and social as the new front door to news consumption. A June 2015 summary of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report described the smartphone as the “defining device” for digital news, with a growing share of users saying it was their main device. The same summary reported Facebook’s increasing dominance as a pathway for news discovery — an early sign of the platform era where publishers would lose direct control of audience and monetization.

At the same time, the advertising market that sustained print was being reshaped into a winner-take-most digital system. Modern MAGNA advertising forecasts (looking back over the trend) show how digital giants consolidated power: Google, Meta and Amazon together accounted for about 51% of total global advertising sales (and 61% outside China) by 2024 — numbers that illustrate what legacy publishers had been competing against for years.

These are later data points, but they confirm the direction of travel that was already visible earlier. Digital advertising is measurable, targetable, and increasingly intermediated through platforms. That combination steadily weakens the value proposition of print as an ad medium — even when print production becomes more efficient.

The “Africa exception” and the logic of delay

If the signals were there, why did NMG still commit such heavy capital to print?

Publicly, NMG’s reasoning was explicit: “despite the changing media consumption patterns globally,” the company believed “the print medium in Africa is still an important source of news and information.” The annual report positions Africa as different — less digitally entrenched, more reliant on print, with a longer runway for newspapers.

Internally, this “Africa exception” logic appears to have been reinforced by specific analyses. The NMG corporate-news feature says that in 2012, select teams across editorial, circulation, advertising, finance and production “sat down to discuss the future of newspaper publishing” and concluded — based on market analysis — that the future of the newspaper in Africa was “bright” and “under-tapped.”

A former senior NMG employee, interviewed confidentially for this investigation, describes the same mindset in plainer terms: executives and board members believed Kenya would lag global disruption by years, and that print dominance would fund whatever came next. In that framing, the press became a “bridge investment” — one last reinforcement of the cash engine before the digital shift fully arrived.

The problem, as the next parts of this series will show, is that the bridge became the destination. The capital and attention poured into print did not translate into a comparable investment cycle in digital product, data, and distribution.

Governance signals hiding in plain sight

The 2015 annual report also contains a revealing governance detail.

In the notice of the 2016 AGM, NMG proposed special resolutions to re-elect several directors “over the age of 70 years” for one-year terms. That is not a criticism — experience can be a strength — but it underscores what the confidential interviews allege: that strategic instincts may have been shaped by leaders whose formative business logic was print-first.

In a rapidly shifting media market, governance composition matters because it influences risk tolerance, time horizons, and the credibility of disruptive proposals coming from younger teams.

What this first chapter establishes

By the time the new press rolled into production in December 2015, NMG had already experienced:

• A policy-driven price shock (VAT) that pushed cover prices upward and coincided with measurable circulation pressure.
• A visible early decline in revenue and profit from the 2013–2014 plateau to the 2015 downturn.
• A public admission that “consumer changing trends” demanded transformation of the company into a digital content business.

And yet, the company still made a large, explicit, print-first capex choice — presented as a rational reinforcement of the “core.”

This is why the press matters in the story of NMG’s decline. It did not cause the digital disruption that was already under way. But it embodies the strategic wager that NMG would have more time than it actually did. It is the moment when a company that could see the next era chose to finance the past — while promising the future.

In the next installment, we examine how NMG attempted to “do digital” after 2016, why those efforts fragmented into silos, and how the platform era steadily captured the value that once flowed to publishers.