The Sun pre-tax loses drop from £63m to £24m in 2017
News UK-owned tabloid The Sun slashed its pre-tax loses in 2017 to £24m amid a print slump and legacy bills from the phone hacking scandal.
The Sun cuts its pre-tax loses by almost a third
The Guardian reports that the UK’s most read tabloid spent £51m handling legal costs and charges related to phone hacking. On the bright side, it dodged a potential bill from HMRC around employment tax liabilities of £55m which could have threatened its pursuit of profit.
The publication dropped £8.5m on redundancy payments and a neat £75m on sales and marketing, amid a 5% drop in sales. In 2016, The Sun reported loses of £62.8m, showing that its 2017 efforts at least showed a viable path towards profit.
Last year, there was a shift at the newspaper, it was revealed that its biggest audience is women, rather than the stereotypically assumed white van man who is synonymous with the title.
Furthermore, after years of being behind a paywall, the paper claimed it overtook Trinity Mirror to be the second most read news site in the UK, sitting behind the Daily Mail.