According to the latest statistics, in the last year, the stock price of US newspaper companies has fallen by an average of 9.9%. At the same time, mainly due to strong sales in India and China, the stock value of newspaper companies worldwide has increased by an average of 25 percent. The development of the global newspaper industry is both hot and cold, according to region.

The reason the US newspaper industry is in such a depressed state is that readers are increasingly turning to the internet for news, causing circulation figures to fall. According to statistics from the US Department of Commerce and the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) there were 43.7 million dailies circulated in the US last September, 30% down on the same period of 1985, which means that six million readers have been lost. The newspaper industry is now one of the US' 10 key declining industries.

In developing countries like India and China, the prospects of the newspaper industry are much more optimistic. Of the 10 high-performing newspaper companies last year, three were from India and two were from China.

India's newspaper industry is booming. Between 2001 and 2005, the circulation of India's dailies increased by 33%. Insiders estimate that the circulation of newspapers in India recently exceeded 80 million per day. According to the latest statistics from WAN, between 2000 and 2004, the circulation of dailies in China grew by 28% percent, and there is room for more growth. According to statistics from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), there is room for the circulation of Chinese dailies to quadruple, if calculated on average levels of the world and of developed countries for the number of dailies read per thousand people.

By People's Daily Online