McGraw-Hill has filed the first extensive SEC document (formally a Form 10) providing disclosure and details about the proposed spinoff, freestanding McGraw-Hill Education company. Once the spinoff is completed, they intend to list the new shares on the NY Stock Exchange–like the current listing–and will trade as MHED. Shareholders of record of the current McGraw-Hill stock will receive one share in the new education company for every three shares they hold. McGraw-Hill Education had 2011 sales of $2.292 billion–down 5.8 percent from the prior year–with directly attributable net income of $162 million. For the first quarter of 2012, sales for […]
Finance
Germany’s Church to Donate, Rather than Sell, Weltbild
Erotica may have gone mainstream for trade publishers but that doesn’t make it any better for a Church-owned publisher. The 12 German Catholic dioceses that own bookselling and publishing giant Weltbild have formally cancelled the sale offering of the company after more than 7 months–either because there were no viable offers, or because the organizations favored continuing to use company to benefit their causes. The church will donate its shares to a non-profit ecclesiastical foundation instead, providing the needed distance from the publisher following last year’s sensational focus on some of the erotica issued by the company. The news was […]
Cengage CEO Dunn Will Move to New Role As Company, Extends Some Debt Payments
Cengage president and ceo Ron Dunn wrote to employees on Thursday to announce that he will “soon step aside…and take on a new role as executive chairman,” promising he will serve in that role for at least 3 years. Dunn is 65 and admits, “realistically, we’re still some time away from making Cengage Learning a publicly traded company through an Initial Public Offering of stock; and when the IPO does occur, investors will rightly expect that the CEO will continue in that role for several years. Those facts, taken together, lead to an inescapable conclusion: it’s time for a younger […]
Chelsea Green Sells Majority Stake to Employees
In an innovative transaction, the employees of publisher Chelsea Green have become the controlling owners of close to 80 percent of the company’s shares. They bought out the company’s outside investors, with president and publisher Margo Baldwin along with Ian Baldwin (who founded the press together in 1984) retaining their minority stake. Chelsea Green’s employee stock ownership plan–which is a pension plan–bought the shares on behalf of the employees. Baldwin notes “the company had to have an outside valuation and the board of directors decided on the share offering price,” which could not exceed the valuation. Baldwin undersores to us, […]
Houghton Pitches Digital Deals and Potential IPO to Financial Press
As indicated in their bankruptcy documents, now that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has cleansed their balance sheet they are hoping to prepare for a sale of shares to the public. Thus begins a campaign to woo the financial press, with stories today in both the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. CEO Linda Zecher tells FT she hopes they can pursue an IPO “over the next 18 to 24 months.” After the unsuccessful effort to sell the small trade division in 2009, Zecher says its place is secure: “What we can gain from trade is far greater than [the benefits […]
With Spinoff Official, Harper UK ceo Barnsley Anticipates “More Clout” While Morrow Restructures Publicity and Marketing Departments
With News Corp making the spinoff of its entire publishing business official, it remains to be seen how the newly formed company will operate over the next few months, pending approval, and afterwards, presuming regulatory bodies give the OK for the split. The new business will start life with cash reserves and without any debt, and Rupert Murdoch, talking to Bloomberg Thursday, was appropriately bullish: “Our publishing business is more valuable than people give us credit for…There are great digital opportunities in publishing, and net-net, around the world, we’ll be increasing our numbers and increasing our costs and hopefully increasing […]