Barnes & Noble filed paperwork with the SEC to prepare the way for Microsoft and Pearson to be able to sell the roughly 3.340 million shares of the bookseller’s stock they were given as part of the deals to buy out their stakes in Nook Media LLC. Those shares comprise a little more than 5.2 percent of Barnes & Noble’s total available shares. A sale of these shares was expected when BN made the deals to end their Nook Media partnership, though neither Microsoft nor Pearson has announced plans for a secondary offering of their shares yet. In other bookseller […]
Finance
Bertelsmann Profit Rises In First Quarter, As Attention Turns to Possible PRH Buyout
Bertelsmann issued a brief first quarter trading update (in the European style), with sales just above flat at €3.92 billion and operating EBITDA up 6.7 percent to €463 million (from €434 million a year ago). Net income rose to €143 million from €106 million last year. Though not mentioned in the report, bear in mind that — as we underscored earlier — that the contribution from Penguin Random House is supercharged this quarter by the strong dollar (and British pound, relative to the euro). CEO Thomas Rabe says in the short release: “The year started well for Bertelsmann. We achieved […]
Renewed Talk of A Possible McGraw-Hill Education IPO
On Friday Reuters reported that Apollo Global Management, the owners of McGraw-Hill Education, are once again talking to investment bankers about taking the publisher public — possibly by the end of the year. zthe “underwriter roles will not be finalized before the summer, four people said this week,” though, and the story touts the idea of an offering “potentially valuing the textbook company at around $5 billion.” But that’s a seller talking, rather than buyers. Remember, however, that talk of a McGraw-Hill Education IPO first surfaced in the press about a year ago. In that article — whose “sources” appeared to be bankers looking […]
Houghton to Buy Scholastic’s Education Technology Business for $575 Million
Scholastic announced it has signed a definitive agreement to sell its Educational Technology and Services business to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Company for $575 million in cash. Scholastic expects to have net proceeds of $360 million to $370 million after taxes, fees and expenses. The business unit they are selling had sales of $249 million, with $40 million in operating income, for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2014 — with sales of $175 million and operating income of $17 million for the first nine months of the current fiscal year. The deal is expected to close in the current calendar quarter. Scholastic says it will “focus on […]
HarperCollins Reaches New Multi-Year Agreement With Amazon
As we intimated in our story last week on HarperCollins’ return to full agency pricing, the company has in fact reached a multi-year agreement with Amazon covering print and digital titles. They said in a statement Monday evening: “HarperCollins has reached an agreement with Amazon and our books will continue to be available on the Amazon print and digital platforms.” Amazon declined to comment. Harper told other retailers last week that the return to agency pricing would go into effect at midnight Pacific time on Monday evening (or, for those keeping track while in London for the Book Fair, 8 AM GMT.) […]
German Giant Media-Saturn Looks to Build On Bankrupt Txtr
Some publishers were recently informed via email that Germany’s txtr, which filed for bankruptcy in late January, will be adopted as the ebook platform for the big consumer electronics retailing group Media-Saturn-Holding as of the beginning of April. (Described as the Best Buy of Germany and/or Europe, the group’s Media Markt, Saturn and Redcoon stores have annual sales of over 20 billion euros.) It’s a logical marriage of convenience, in that txtr was already working with MSH on their ebook plans. MSH is currently working to turn JUKE! — an established streaming music subscription service — into a much broader digital […]