SPH ups prices

Singapore - With newsprint and production costs soaring, Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) has announced a price hike for some of its newspapers, marking the first readjustment in the past five years.

While SPH continues to absorb the goods and services tax, it will raise prices of The Straits Times and The Sunday Times, currently at 70 cents and 80 cents respectively, by 10 cents for the Sunday to Friday editions and by 20 cents for the Saturday edition. The changes are effective from 1 October.

SPH had not returned calls, on how its advertising revenue had fared in the past few months, by the time of writing.

Alan Chan, CEO of SPH, said in a statement "this is only the third price revision in 23 years for our print products".

"We have tried to contain costs, but newspaper production expenses have gone up steeply, in particular the US dollar price of newsprint has almost doubled since 2004. The impact has been considerable, as evident in newspaper publishers around the world also increasing their cover prices, some as early as last year," he said.

Others SPH newspapers to have seen a hike include Chinese daily Lianhe Zaobao up by 5 cents, Saturday edition of Berita Harian and the group's Malay daily by 10 cents.

Those untouched are The New Paper and Tamil Murasu, bilingual product ‘mypaper', group's suite of new online products - such as zaobao.com, omy, STOMP, ST RazorTV and ST Breaking News.