Pearson cheered investors by announcing plans for a third broad-scale restructuring, focused on North America, which should lead to further staff reductions. For now, all they are saying is, “We have engaged in a further rigorous cost benchmarking process across our business and have identified a further significant additional cost saving opportunity, the largest parts of which are in general and administrative expenses and in North America. We are currently undertaking the detailed planning to enable us to deliver annualized cost savings of £300m by the end of 2019. We will give more detail on the timing and costs of […]
Earnings Reports
Simon & Schuster Gains In First Quarter
Simon & Schuster’s parent company CBS reported first quarter earnings on Thursday afternoon, with the publisher recording sales of $161 million, up $16 million (or 11 percent) over the same period last year. Helped by the acquisition in the previous quarter of Adams Media, the company saw broad sales gains, with ceo Carolyn Reidy telling us, “every single one of our divisions was up” in the quarter, with the double digit gains in digital audio — up 35 percent — adult publishing (which includes Adams), and international. CBS said “the increase was led by growth in print book sales and digital […]
Houghton Stabilizes As Trade Sales Lift In First Quarter
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reported less dramatic results for their first quarter on Thursday morning. Sales of $221.9 million were up $16.1 million from a year ago, largely due to higher sales in California Reading and a $5 million fee “associated with the expiration of a distribution agreement.” They were also helped by a rebound in the trade division, where sales were up by $5 million (after declining $2.3 million in the same quarter a year ago). The operating loss, for what is seasonally their worst quarter, improved to ($96) million, from ($122) million a year ago — but nearly all of the costs and […]
Apple’s “Services” Keep Growing
Apple reported their fiscal second quarter on Tuesday afternoon, with sales of $ 52.9 billion and net income of $11.03 billion, both up modestly from the same quarter a year ago. The “services” category, which includes their digital media sales, had sales of $7.04 billion, up 18% from 5.99 billion a year ago — confirming our conclusion that Apple would pull clearly ahead of Amazon this year in media/services sales. (As noted last week, as of 2017 Amazon no longer breaks out “media” sales, so it’s less obvious that they have fallen behind here. For scale, note as well that Netflix took […]
Amazon Gains In First Quarter, Changes Revenue Reporting Lines
Amazon reported first quarter sales on Thursday afternoon, with net revenues rising 23 percent to $35.7 billion in the first quarter, compared with $29.1 billion in 2016. Operating income was down modestly at $1.05 billion, but net income rose to $724 million — compared to $513 million a year ago, because of lower income taxes. As usual, AWS (Amazon Web Services) on its own generated most of the operating income, at $890 million. The big news is that the company recategorized some of their revenue breakouts. Unfortunately, they no longer quantify the slower-growing media categories that included books, ebooks, and digital audio. Indicative of the […]
Quarto’s Earnings Suffer From Direct Sales Unit
Quarto reported sales of $188 million for 2016, up $6 million from the year before, though operating profit fell to just $1.7 million, due to the $14.2 impairment charge related to the Books & Gifts Direct businesses in Australia and New Zealand that are being sold. Operating profit absent that division was $18.6 million, up $3 million. “Underlying” sales, without the $12.7 million added by the acquisitions of becker&mayer and Harvard Common Press during the year, also declined. (In particular, becker&mayer “exceeded management expectations by effectively becoming our sixth most profitable imprint this year.”) After tax, the company recorded a […]