Tuesday, May 20, 2003

Bertelsmann discards Springer Just recently we profiled Bertelsmann, a company that seemed in better shape than some other media giants. But the company still felt that it had to discard one of its divisions, namely the Bertelsmann Springer division, publishers of scientific, academic, and engineering books and periodicals. The selling price is in the neighborhood of one billion euros. (The announced deal is subject to antitrust review.) The division was put together by augmenting Bertelsmann's own technical publishing with the 1999 acquisition of Springer Verlag, a revered German science publisher. Other brands include Birkhäuser, Ärzte Zeitung, Princeton Architectural, Key Curriculum, Platow, Gabler, Bauverlag, Heinrich Vogel as well as a number of online services and the electronic service SpringerLink. Bertelsmann Springer was still a small part of the conglomerate's total revenues, under four percent. The buyer is not another publisher but two large European private, London-based equity companies, Candover Group and Cinven. Candover, founded in 1980, has invested in 117 buyouts worth over 22 billion euros. Cinven, which became an independent company in 1995, the firm has been a totally independent business since 1995, has led transactions in excess of 25 billion euros. What their game? They can combine the assets of the Bertelsmann Springer group with those of a company they bought out last year, the Dutch scientific publisher Kluwer Academic. The new company will compete well against Reed Elsevier, the leader in the technical/academic publishing industry in Europe. Once the merger goes through, it seems likely that Candover and Cinven will resell the combined company or spin it off as a public offering. So goes the shuffle of hot properties from oligopolies to takeover specialists and back again. 8:22:11 PM

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