The Sun made a loss of more than £60m last year as steep declines in print advertising, redundancy costs and phone-hacking charges battered the tabloid.

Its stablemate the Times also slipped into the red, reporting a pretax loss of £5m in the year to 3 July, down from a profit of £8.8m in 2015, in part due to racking up £13.7m in redundancy restructuring costs.



The Sun fared significantly worse, notching up a pretax loss of £62.8m for the same period last year, according to accounts filed at Companies House for its parent company News Group Newspapers.



The Sun narrowed its losses (£79m in 2015), mainly due to a significant reduction in charges relating to legal claims and costs relating to phone hacking. These costs and provisions fell from about £65m in 2015 to £30m last year.



The Sun also spent £14.8m on one-off restructuring costs and significantly boosted sales and marketing spend, from £55m to £75.9m, on campaigns around Euro 2016 and “spend and save” promotions.



Total revenues fell from £456m to £446m as a steep decline in print advertising failed to be offset by income from other areas, including the now free-access Sun website. The Sun scrapped its paywall in November 2015 after two years.



“The main driver of this decline [in revenues] was the challenging market conditions for newspaper print advertising with double-digit declines currently common across the industry,” the company said.

“The print advertising revenue decline offset the growth in both print circulation [revenue], supported by an increase in the Monday to Friday cover price during the year, and excellent digital advertising growth, following the removal of the paywall for the Sun website.”



Excluding one-off and exceptional charges, the Sun said it had made £16m in profit last year, almost half the £29m in 2015.



The Sun’s performance is in stark contrast to the Times and Sunday Times, which proved remarkably resilient despite tough market conditions.



Total revenues barely budged year-on-year, dropping from £342.5m to £341.6m, as the titles managed to mostly offset print advertising declines.

Its parent company, Times Newspapers Limited, said there was a “solid” performance in print sales income, including the first cover price increase in two years last April, and digital subscriptions, which grew to 182,000.

The Times spent almost £33m on sales and marketing last year.



The parent company said that, stripping out the exceptional costs, the Times had made an adjusted operating profit of £11.2m, down from £18.6m.

