New name and price next year for Sunday Business

Sunday Business will be renamed The Business when it relaunches on 6 January. It will remain on sale on Mondays and the price will be cut to 50p.

By doubling the days it is on sale and halving the price, Press Holdings is hoping The Business will become a second buy and give sales a substantial boost, said editor-in-chief Andrew Neil.

He told Press Gazette: "Those newsagents we already supply will keep it out on a Monday and we’ll get a chance to sell more. ABC has cleared us to aggregate the circulation.

"As we move the paper to being more analytical, with scoops, then it will still be pretty fresh because the analysis will still be as relevant on a Monday as it would have been on a Sunday."

In addition, up to 25,000 copies of The Business will also be delivered to newsagents in what Neil describes as "key London transport points and City square mile points", which are closed on a Sunday.

"It will also mean we can at last do office copies – which is where so much of the FT sales come from," explained Neil. These will be sold at a special rate to big City firms.

It had been hoped Sunday Business would become a profitable stand-alone newspaper, with the addition of its magazine Business and Pleasure and the added-value of Sport First, which was being given away free with the paper, said Neil, who had been looking at trying to tie up a deal with The Week.

"But the cost of doing that in the current climate is impossible," he stated. "So we are going back to the core competence of our 36 business pages. At 50p it is now an additional buy – you can buy The Sunday Times or The Mail on Sunday and The Business and still have change from £2."

Sport First will no longer accompany the paper.

Neil has appointed more staff for The Business – Matthew Guarante, Sunday Business investment editor, has accepted the post of associate editor in charge of the back of the book, to include the executive management pages and the investor finance pages.

Political editor Andrew Porter will also stay on. Neil has yet to choose City and production editors and interviews began last Friday for up to 10 business correspondents.

"I would like to fill the posts from the existing staff," said Neil, who has also asked the Press Association, which will now produce The Business, to recruit from axed Sunday Business staff for positions it is advertising.

By Jean Morgan