Barnes & Noble reports fourth quarter and full fiscal year earnings on Tuesday morning before the market opens. Analysts have low expectations, looking for sales to fall about 4 percent to $1.33 billion, and predicting another sizable loss of 99 cents per share. The company’s stock has fallen back to earth since the error-plagued TechCrunch report on documents showing possible interest in a Microsoft buyout of Nook–which sent shares up to more than $23 a share in May. (It has given up almost all of those gains, now back under $19 a share–falling again first thing this morning, along with […]
Finance
Springer Sold To BC Partners After All For 3.3 Billion Euros
The longstanding efforts by private equity owners EQT and the Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund to sell Springer Science has come to an end after another late-game twist. Just five days after announcing they would walk away from BC Partners’ recent offer to buy the company and pursue a long-contemplated IPO, Springer’s owners closed the deal with BC for approximately €3.3 billion euros. Sources told Reuters that EQT and the Singaporean fund “would keep a stake of about 10 percent in Springer between them, with BC Partners confirming the minority stake. The purchase, which also depends on Springer’s future performance, will be backed […]
Springer Decides on IPO; Pottermore Offers More
The longstanding efforts by private equity owners EQT and the Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund to sell Springer Science have taken yet another twist. They will walk away from BC Partners’ recent offer to buy the entire company for approximately €3.1 billion, and instead will go ahead with the long-contemplated IPO. The WSJ says that share offering “could value Springer Science at more than €3 billion, people familiar with the matter have said previously” — as well it should if they turned down that sum as a full buyout. They have been trying, since last fall, to get a valuation of closer […]
Closing: Harper’s New Zealand Warehouse and Audible’s Author Services Bounty
Consistent with HarperCollins’ “investor day” presentation we cited recently showing the company plans to have just four warehouses worldwide by 2014, the publisher is closing their New Zealand-based warehouse and switching distribution and support services to the company’s distribution center in Australia. The number of job losses was not clear, though general manager Graham Mitchell will leave the company after a transition period. Harper Australia chief executive James Kellow said in a statement the company “remained committed to publishing New Zealand books for New Zealand readers and looked forward to maintaining a local publishing programme in the future.” He added: […]
People, Etc.
Co-founder and ceo of Figment.com Jacob Lewis will join the Crown group on July 8 in the new position of vp, publishing director for Crown, Hogarth, and Broadway Books, reporting to Molly Stern. He will “partner” with Stern on “the day-to-day strategy and business development of the lists, with particular focus on the publishing of our nonfiction titles and marketing initiatives in the digital space.” Prior to launching the online reading and writing community for teens in 2009, Lewis had worked for 12 years at the New Yorker and then was managing editor at Condé Nast Portfolio. Founder of Bloomsbury […]
Harper Shares Data on Light Third Quarter; Shows Investors Profitability of eBook
Overlooked in the run up to BEA was the “investor day” presentations regarding the new News Corp., held in New York last Tuesday, and the release of additional financial data through the company’s fiscal third quarter. In early May when the parent company reported results through March 31, they did not break out HarperCollins’ third quarter performance — but it can be derived out of the new year-to-date data. For the period, Harper recorded sales of $311 million (their lightest quarter of the fiscal year so far) and EBITDA of $29 million. eBooks comprised 21.3 percent of Harper’s sales in […]