Bloomsbury reported results for their fiscal year, ending February 28, with sales of £142.6 million, up £18.9 million, as profit before tax fell £1 million to £12 million. Despite their intention “to become primarily a non-consumer publisher in the B2B academic and professional information market,” Bloomsbury is still very much Harry Potter House. Virtually all of the gains came from their children’s division, where sales rose £18.2 million to £55.9 million — as Potter sales were 88 percent higher than the previous year — and the weak British pound was the other main driver. (Topline sales were up 15 percent, but […]
Publishers
Lagardere Publishing Gains On Perseus and Rowling
Lagardere Publishing reported results for the first quarter of 2017, with sales of €440 million, up €25 million from a year ago — though €18 million of that gain came from the addition of the Perseus imprints, leaving a 1.7 percent rise in the traditionally modest quarter. A “significant restocking of J.K. Rowling titles” in the UK accounted a portion of the increase as well. The good news is that both HBG USA and Hachette UK improved in the quarter, up 4.1 percent and 8.1 percent respectively; though that is muted when you remember that both divisions declined significantly in the […]
Harper’s Sales Rebound A Little
Sales rebounded somewhat at HarperCollins in the parent company News Corp.’s fiscal third quarter, ending March 31, with revenues of $374 million. That’s a $16 million gain from the same quarter a year ago, though that was a poor period for Harper; in the same quarter in fiscal 2015 sales were $402 million. And $7 million of the quarter’s gain came from the impact of international acquisitions. In the conference call with investors, executives admitted that sales of Veronica Roth’s Carve the Mark, while a contributor to the quarter, “were off to a slower start than anticipated.” In the coming quarter, though […]
Pearson Shares Rise On A Third Big Restructuring, and Possible Sale of K-12 Publishing Business
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 […]
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 […]