Fourth quarter adjusted sales at Wiley rose 3 percent to $441 million, as operating income of $58.9 million dropped 9 percent and adjusted net income of $42.6 million (or 71 cents a share) was down 6 percent. For the full year, sales of $1.761 billion were virtually flat compared to a year ago, with operating income of $252.4 million and net income of $175.6 million declining 6 and 7 percent, respectively. (Adjusted results reflect the trade publishing properties sold to Google, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and other companies, a process which was “effectively complete” by the end of the fourth quarter.) […]
Publishers
Profits Rise at Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury finished their fiscal year ending February 28 well, riding digital growth to pre-tax profit of £9.8 million (up 16 percent), even as sales only nudged up $1.1 million to £98.5 million from continuing operations. Underlying sales — excluding the Fairchild Books and Applied Visual Arts acquisitions from during the year, were down 5 percent, to £92.5 million. eBook sales rose “strongly” as print declined, up 61 percent overall to £9.1 million. eBooks accounted for 13 percent of adult trade sales; in the US they comprised “27 percent of net title sales, but UK e-book sales are accelerating and now […]
Lagardere Publishing Rises On Strong Quarter In US and France
Lagardere Publishing rebounded in the first quarter of 2013, with sales of 419 million euros up 6.6 percent (or 25 million euros) on a topline basis, and up 7.9 percent according to the company’s like-for-like comparison. Hachette Book Group USA was a bright spot (following a soft holiday quarter to end 2012), up 14.9 percent, thanks to “a host of new works” and strong backlist film tie-ins including Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks, Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, and A Story Of God And All Of Us by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey. “As usual, sales of […]
After Layoffs and A Big Writedown, Cengage Talks Openly About Chapter 11
Cengage continues its slow march to the inevitable restructuring that has loomed for a while, and for the first time management has openly (and casually) talked about bankruptcy reorganization. The main questions now are who will lead that bankruptcy plan, can they organize a pre-packaged plan, and which private equity company will control what’s left? The latest step is driven by Cengage’s third quarter earnings report. In a modest “operational restructuring” they took a $12.7 million charge related to firing an unspecified number of employees. More significantly, the preliminary results of a new strategic plan and revised more realistic expectations […]
Acquisitions Help HMH Trade
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reported results for the first quarter of 2013, with the trade unit continuing the upswing from the end of 2012, driven by the acquisition of the Wiley culinary titles “as well as general interest and young readers titles.” HMH Trade sales of $39.8 million were up 25 percent compared to $31.9 million a year, and EBITDA nearly doubled to $6.7 million. (The unit records a high margin in part because HMH accounts separately for “certain general overhead costs not fully allocated to the business units such as legal, accounting, treasury, human resources and C-suite functions” in a […]
Another Opaque Quarter for Harper With News Corp Spinoff Closer to Completion
News Corp. reported third quarter earnings after the close of the market Wednesday and once again the company disclosed nothing in particular about HarperCollins. Notably, this time around it didn’t even merit an adjective. (Harper itself characterized the previous quarters as “favorable”: before that, it was “solid,” “challenging,” and “terrific” — but this time they declined to comment.) At the larger newspaper publishing unit of which Harper is a small part, sales decreased $87 million to $1.938 billion, while operating income dropped $45 million, to $85 million. The declines owed to another $42 million in costs related to the phone-hacking investigations […]