$40.51
$89.39
bear $40.51
base $70.81
bull $89.39
margin of safety $46.00
market price* $67.78
The New York Times Company sells subscriptions to its news report and a bundle of digital products (Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, The Athletic and Audio), plus print editions, advertising and content licensing. At the end of 2025 it had about 12.78 million subscribers, 12.21 million of them digital-only, after adding roughly 1.4 million digital-only subscribers during the year. 2025 revenue was $2.82 billion (up 9.2%): subscriptions $1.95 billion (digital-only $1.43 billion, up 14.3%), advertising $566 million (digital up 20%, print down 5.4%) and affiliate, licensing and other $308 million. Print is a shrinking legacy business (about 570,000 home-delivery subscribers); the growth and the economics are now digital. Owner earnings. We measure the cash the business produces for owners as operating cash flow, less working-capital swings, less stock-based compensation (a real cost to shareholders: it rose from $12 million in 2016 to $74 million in 2025), less the capital spending needed to maintain the business. On that basis owner earnings per share were $0.46 (2016), -$0.06 (2017), $0.35 (2018), $0.81 (2019), $1.10 (2020), $1.30 (2021), $1.16 (2022), $1.77 (2023), $1.95 (2024) and $2.47 (2025). Accounting judgements: deferred tax swings are treated as timing and removed with working capital, so 2025 is not flattered by the roughly $39 million of deferred tax in that year; cash funding of the legacy pension plans is kept as a real cost; about $28 million a year of amortization of acquired intangibles (largely from The Athletic) is added back as a non-cash charge, so any decay in those acquired products is carried in the bear case rather than in the earnings level. 2017 is distorted by $120 million of discretionary pension contributions. Interest is negligible (about $0.1 million paid in 2025), so cash flow before lenders is effectively the same as owner earnings. Starting level. Years before 2023 describe a different business (pension-heavy, pre-Athletic, and 2022 was the acquisition and integration year), so we use 2023-2025, whose median is $1.95. Two subsequent quarters corroborate that 2025 was not a peak: first-half 2026 revenue rose 11.6% to $1.47 billion, net income rose 37% to $181 million and operating cash flow rose to $287 million from $213 million. We therefore start from the 2025 level of $2.47, not higher. Owner earnings grew 26.7% in 2025; every case assumes a lower first-year rate. Valuation. Every case is discounted at 6%. The company has no borrowings (its credit facility was undrawn at year-end 2025) and held about $1.22 billion of cash and marketable securities at June 30, 2026; we count about $1.1 billion as surplus to operations, roughly $6.73 a share. Each case is therefore business value plus cash, with nothing owed to lenders. Base case ($70.81): the subscription engine keeps doing what it has demonstrably done - adding digital subscribers to the bundle and moving them from promotional to full prices (2025 ARPU up 2.7% to $9.68) - while print keeps shrinking. Owner earnings rise 12% in 2026 (already supported by first-half results), about 6% a year through 2029, then taper to 3% by 2035 as the subscriber base matures, reaching about $4.17 a share. After 2035 we hold earnings flat with no further growth, on the strength of a brand and subscriber relationship that have persisted for well over a century. Business worth about $10.5 billion ($64.08 a share), plus $6.73 of surplus cash, nothing owed. We give no credit to further margin expansion beyond what 2026 has already shown, to continued 20% digital advertising growth, to new AI licensing deals, to management's subscriber targets, or to any recovery from the copyright suits against Microsoft and OpenAI (filed December 2023) and Perplexity (filed December 2025). Bear case ($40.51): generative-AI products, which the company itself names as competitors, cut into search referrals and new-subscriber acquisition; growth relies only on price step-ups; print advertising and print subscriptions keep declining; The Athletic's acquired value wears away. Owner earnings rise 8% in 2026, flatten near $2.72 by 2027-2028, then decline 1-2% a year to about $2.41 by 2035 and 3% a year thereafter. Business worth about $5.5 billion ($33.78 a share), plus $6.73 of cash, nothing owed. Bull case ($89.39): subscriber additions continue near the 2025 pace, price step-ups and the operating leverage already visible in 2025 and 2026 continue, and licensing agreements with digital platforms keep growing. Owner earnings rise 20% in 2026 and 12% in 2027, tapering to 4% by 2035 (about $5.54 a share), then hold flat. Business worth about $13.5 billion ($82.65 a share), plus $6.73 of cash. What would make this wrong: a sustained drop in digital subscriber additions or ARPU as AI answer engines substitute for the news report would push value toward the bear case; a favorable outcome or settlement in the AI copyright litigation, or new paid licensing at scale, would add value we have not counted. Change since our previous analysis: we now discount all cases at a single 6% rate and no longer assume perpetual growth after year ten, and we measure owner earnings after removing working-capital swings (2025 owner earnings are $2.47 a share on this basis, lower than the earlier figure). Strong first-half 2026 results lifted the near-term path. Net effect: bear rises to $40.51 from $31.90, base to $70.81 from $66.10, and bull falls to $89.39 from $101.80. Margin-of-safety price ($46): the target is a 20% annual return. From $46, if the shares move toward base value (which itself grows about 6-7% a year) within about three years, the base case implies roughly 20% annually including dividends; the price sits only about 14% above the bear-case value, and the business has a debt-free balance sheet and recurring subscription revenue. A price much above $46 would require the base case to arrive sooner than we can count on.