Chegg‘s fourth quarter sales were down 19 percent to $68 million and below what analysts were expecting — and their forecast for Q1 and all of 2016 also shows sales declining, once again below analysts’ expectations, as the company continues its pivot to focus on student services and outsource textbook rentals to Ingram in exchange for commission revenue. Investors evacuated the stock on the news on Tuesday, sending shares down over 35 percent to their lowest point yet (dropping about $1.90 a share). Shares have rebounded some in Wednesday morning trading, regaining about 50 cents a share. China Daily reports […]
Bookstores
Briefs: Harper Pairs with Temple Hill, Final Days for St. Mark’s, and More
Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey’s film production company Temple Hill Entertainment has a new publishing agreement with HarperCollins in which the producers will “generate original ideas and opportunities for books and series,” that Harper will publish under the Temple Hill Publishing banner. Petersen Harris at Temple Hill will serve as their vp, publishing (he ran the Penguin Development Group before joining the production company in 2014, and is the son of Susan Petersen Kennedy and Bruce Harris), and the producers were represented by Writers House in the publishing deal. Temple Hill has produced adaptions of both YA (The Fault in Our Stars; Paper Towns, The […]
General Growth CEO “Clarifies” Amazon Comments In the Vaguest Way
CEO of mall operator General Growth Properties Sandeep Mathrani was forced to put out a statement Wednesday afternoon after generating a firestorm of media with his casual reference to Amazon’s “goal…as I understand” to open hundreds of physical bookstores. The funny part is that the statement is titled, “General Growth Properties CEO Sandeep Mathrani Clarifies Statement About Amazon,” while it actually clarifies nothing at all. It simply reiterates what already happened: “Mathrani has indicated that a statement he made concerning Amazon during GGP’s earnings conference call held on February 2, 2016, was not intended to represent Amazon’s plans.” Just as […]
General Growth CEO Casually Claims Amazon Wants to Open Hundreds of Bookstores
Mall owner General Growth Properties claims that Amazon is looking to open hundreds of brick-and-mortar bookstores. The remark came in the company’s earnings call with investors Tuesday afternoon. Answering a question about mall traffic, what CEO Sandeep Mathrani actually said was, “And just case in point, you’ve got Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores and their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400 bookstores — and it should sit back and say the last mile is all important,” which is why online retailers in general are expanding their physical store presence. Amazon declined to comment, as did a General […]
Briefs: Italy Investigates Merger, St. Mark’s Benefactor Returns, and More
As expected — albeit on a slow timetable — Italy’s Competition Authority announced last Thursday it has formally opened an investigation into the proposed purchase of RCS Media’s book publishing group by Mondadori. (After more than 7 months of negotiation and consideration, the 127.5 million euro sale was agreed to by the RCS board last October.) The combined companies are expected to control approximately 35 percent of the trade book market in Italy. The CA will aim to “determine whether the acquisition of RCS books by Mondadori will result in the creation or strengthening of a dominant position” in the trade publishing market. […]
PRH Recovers From Systems Outage; ABA Winter Institute Faces Winter Storm
Penguin Random House has been working to overcome widespread systems issues at their Westminster, MD facility since early Tuesday morning that interrupted key internal resources, including order processing, as well as many of the company’s web sites. Ironically, the outages aligned with the UK launch of their new consumer-facing website Wednesday, even as the corporate UK site was down. (That site is live again now.) Penguinrandomhouse.com, the global corporate site and a wide variety of other sites run out of the US — including the company’s intranet — remain offline as we write this Wednesday morning. For better or for worse, […]