Axel Springer SE

Who owns Axel Springer?

Friede Springer and Mathias Döpfner hold roughly 95 percent of Axel Springer SE, with Döpfner exercising sole voting control under a shareholder agreement. Axel Sven Springer and the Friede Springer Foundation hold the rest. The company has been family-owned since April 2025.

Is Axel Springer publicly traded?

No. Axel Springer delisted from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2020 after the KKR take-private and has remained private. It now describes itself as a debt-free family-owned company.

What happened between Axel Springer and KKR?

KKR and CPP Investments took Axel Springer private in 2019-2020 and held a 48.54 percent stake. In April 2025 the parties split: the investors received majority ownership of classifieds businesses The Stepstone Group and AVIV, while the media and commerce assets reverted to the Springer family and Döpfner.

What brands does Axel Springer own?

Its portfolio includes BILD, WELT, POLITICO, BUSINESS INSIDER, Morning Brew, Bisnow, idealo, Bonial, Awin, Emarketer, and the Ringier Axel Springer joint venture publishing FAKT, FORBES, NEWSWEEK, and ONET in Poland. It also holds 10 percent of Stepstone and AVIV.

How much revenue does Axel Springer generate?

Axel Springer reported €2.2 billion in pro forma group revenue for 2025, slightly above the prior year, with adjusted EBIT of €241.4 million and adjusted EBITDA of €364 million. Q1 2026 revenue rose 2.6 percent year over year.

Where is Axel Springer headquartered?

The company is headquartered in Berlin, Germany, on Axel-Springer-Strasse, near both its historic high-rise publishing house and the newer Axel Springer Campus designed by OMA.

Axel Springer founded his publishing house in Hamburg in 1946 with a license to print magazines. The company grew through acquisitions of established papers, then launched BILD in 1952, a tabloid that reached circulations above 4 million and became the commercial engine of the group for half a century. WELT followed in 1953 as the quality national paper. Springer moved his headquarters to Berlin in 1966, building beside the Wall as a political statement.

When Springer died in 1985, the company went public on the Frankfurt exchange, and his widow Friede Springer became the family's controlling shareholder. The print business delivered decades of profits, but the digital era required reinvention. Mathias Döpfner, a journalist by training, became CEO in 2002 and spent two decades reshaping the group: divesting women's magazines and regional papers, acquiring jobs platform StepStone, and pivoting toward English-language growth.

The US expansion was methodical. Axel Springer bought BUSINESS INSIDER in 2015 for $442 million, took a majority of POLITICO's US arm in 2021 for roughly $1 billion, and acquired Morning Brew through Insider in 2020 and fully in 2025. In 2019, facing a depressed public valuation, Döpfner and Friede Springer accepted KKR's take-private offer at €63 per share; CPP Investments joined, and the investors eventually held 48.54 percent via the Traviata vehicle. The partnership funded classifieds expansion until September 2024, when both sides agreed the businesses would be stronger apart.

The split closed April 29, 2025. KKR and CPP took majority control of The Stepstone Group and real estate platform AVIV, with Axel Springer keeping 10 percent stakes in both. The media and commerce assets returned to Friede Springer and Döpfner, who emerged holding roughly 95 percent, with Axel Sven Springer and the Friede Springer Foundation holding the rest. The company reported €2.2 billion in pro forma 2025 revenue, up slightly year on year, with adjusted EBIT of €241.4 million, and acquired Bisnow in 2026, forming Brew Media Group with Morning Brew.

Axel Springer has faced scrutiny on several fronts. BILD's aggressive tabloid journalism has generated decades of press-council complaints and public debate in Germany, including the 2021 internal investigation that removed BILD's editor-in-chief over workplace conduct findings. Döpfner's personal texts, leaked in 2022, revealed editorial-influence discussions that drew criticism. The company's lobbying on ancillary copyright and its contentious relationship with Google over news licensing have also kept it in regulatory focus, and German media concentration reviews tracked the 2025 ownership restructuring.