Archives for May 2006

Ottakar’s Accepts Low Bid Having rejected a bid thought to be around 285p a share a couple of weeks ago (when its stock was trading at about 330p), the desparate board of Ottakar’s has now accepted a bid of precisely 285p from HMV. Since rejecting the first bid, Ottakar’s stock had plunged, spurred by another bad earnings report, but was still at 287p yesterday before the offer was accepted. Worth just under 63 million pounds overall, the bid is about a third less than HMV was prepared to pay last September. As Publishing News notes, however, shareholders will have until […]

Price of Business in the UK The high price of coop fees for prime display during the holiday selling season in the UK has sparked a wave of articles in London’s Times (which claims to have first “exposed” coop payments five years ago). The paper says that WH Smith is charging about $94,000 a week to participate in the “adult gold” level of its “recommended reads” program in the weeks before Christmas. A spokesman for Smith’s says that the adult gold program is “oversubscribed.” Regular “read of the week” slots reportedly cost $28,000 a week at Smith’s, while Waterstone’s charges […]

Tuesday, May 30 Our Usual Reminder If for some reason this has reached you even though you are not a paying member of PublishersMarketplace, please visit the link below to join us all the time for complete deal reports and more. Click to register http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/register.shtml Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time […]

Solid Attendance at BEA Show organizers report that 31,971 people registered for the convention, while 22,366 verified attendees were counted. (The verified number represents people whose badges were scanned at the badge-holder pick-up counter and upon entering the show floors. The actual number of participants is somewhere in between the two figures.) This year’s numbers are closer to last year’s NYC show (34,966 registered/27,421 verified) than the 2004 show in Chicago (25,261 registered/18,213 verified). Book buyers registered declined slightly, however, to 7,324 — down from 7,701 a year ago and 7,492 in 2004. (BEA did not have a count for […]

Bertelsmann Confirms Buyback Bertelsmann will pay approximately $5.8 billion to buy back the 25 percent stake in the company held by GBL, preventing a public offering of the shares. In a letter to employees signed by Gunther Thielen and Liz Mohn, they declare that “the price is reasonable, taking into account the strong current trading as well the positive outlook for next years.” The company will finance the repurchase with a bridge loan, and plans to sell off its BMG Music Publishing business to help pay down the loan. That unit is expected to be worth between $1.4 billion and […]

Sales Nudge Up at Borders, But Profits Suffer Poor Borders. They actually outperformed their peers in their fiscal first quarter by showing a small comparable-store sales gain at their domestic superstores of 0.7% (compared, albeit, to a weak quarter a year ago). But losses were higher than anticipated, at 29 cents a share, due to “costs related to strategic initiatives combined with a challenging sales environment… especially in the U.K. and at Waldenbooks stores, but also at domestic Borders superstores late in the quarter.” Those strategic initiatives were supposed to be adding to profits already, but in today’s release, the […]