Not surprisingly, following the big $540 million acquisition of Relias Learning last year and a number of substantial investments in the field, Bertelsmann has set up the Bertelsmann Education Group as its own business unit. Kay Krafft, who has managed Bertelsmann’s education enterprises since 2014, is ceo of the new group, and Jarek Gabor is cfo. Headquartered in New York, BEG will be managed by Bertelsmann’s Corporate Investments division. Bertelsmann ceo Thomas Rabe said in the announcement (as he has before), “Education is one of Bertelsmann’s key growth platforms, and we want to expand this segment into our third mainstay of business, alongside media […]
Finance
Barnes & Noble Stock Falls Nearly 28 Percent In A Day
Barnes & Noble’s stock started falling from the opening bell on Wednesday morning after the company reported bigger than expected losses (while management acted like everything was wonderful). But the selloff turned into a stampede late in the afternoon, with significant volume in final hour of trading pushing shares down $4.51 for the day, a decline of 27.7 percent, to close at $11.79 a share. The market as a whole turned negative in the afternoon as well, also trading down in the last hour, but the market movement was nothing like the bookseller’s falloff. In total, 9.45 million shares of […]
Perseus Hires Greenhill to Explore Sale
The Perseus Books Group announced Wednesday afternoon that “it has initiated a formal process to explore a potential sale of the business” and has retained Gregory Miller at Greenhill & Co. (Miller represented Scholastic in the recent sale of their education business.) PBG CEO David Steinberger says in the announcement, “We have received multiple inquiries from parties expressing significant interest in the company.” He added, “The Perseus Books board has determined that it is our fiduciary responsibility to explore a potential sale transaction.” As we noted when Centre Lane Partners took control of parent company Perseus LLC early in the year at […]
Briefs: BitLit and Kindle Scout Expand, Scholastic UK Purchase
Amazon’s “reader-powered publishing platform” Kindle Scout is expanding beyond the US, welcoming author submissions from Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and India. The company says that so far, 75 titles have been picked up for publication by Kindle Press. Also expanding is BitLit, the company that helps enable print and ebook bundling. The start-up is working with Ingram to let publishers who use CoreSource Plus for digital asset management and distribution integrate with BitLit. In the UK, Scholastic Ltd. has acquired Troubadour, which operates as The Travelling Book Company. With a network of sales agents who work with schools across the UK and Ireland, […]
Corporate: McGraw-Hill Education Files for IPO; Meredith Sold to Media General
As indicated recently by Reuters, McGraw-Hill Education did indeed file preliminary paperwork with the SEC last week to launch an IPO, probably before the end of the year. For filing purposes they use a placeholder value of $100 million, though the actual offering is expected to look to raise up to five times that amount in actual proceeds. For the first six months of 2015 MHE had sales of $670 million, with a net loss of -$256 million. In 2014, the company had sales of $1.856 billion and a loss of -$331 million. As of June 30, the company carried […]
McGraw-Hill Education Said to Hire Underwriters for End-of-Year IPO
Consistent with reports from this spring — and rumors from 2014 — McGraw-Hill Education’s private equity owners Apollo Global Management look to be moving ahead with plans for an IPO. “People familiar with the matter” tell Reuters the company has hired Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters and “expects to launch the IPO at the end of the year” following back-to-school sales. The market will determine the company’s value, but the leakers continue to assert a range of between $5 billion and $6 billion, including debt — which continues to sound aggressive until proven otherwise. Apollo bought the company in […]