What you can say about Lagardere Publishing’s reported sales for the first half of the year is, it could have been worse. Even with “a substantial market contraction in all countries in which the division operates”–from a 2.9 percent decline in French results to a 4 percent drop in US sales and a 7.6 percent decline in the UK–totals sales of 905 million euros were actually up, by a slim 0.5 percent on a reported basis, compared to 900 million euros a year ago. (Apparently “a complex accounting adjustment linked to reserves for returns in education” helped balance out those […]
