Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck

Company Website

Macmillan (US operations): http://www.macmillan.com/
Bedford, Freeman & Worth (college division): http://bfwpub.com/
Subsidiaries of Verlagsguppe Georg von Holtzbrinck (Stuttgart, German)

Location

New York, NY, USA

Financial Information

• Private company (not publicly traded)
• Annual Operating Revenue of Parent Company: $4,087,000,000 (Source: ORBIS)
• Higher Education Revenue, 2007: $163,688,000 (Mickey and Meaney 2008, 149)
  • 6.5% increase in revenue from 2006 ($153,698,000) (Mickey and Meaney 2008, ibid.)
• Bedford, Freedman & Worth ranks 5th in Higher Education sales (Mickey and Meaney 2008, 148)

Merges and Acquisitions

• Hayden-McNeil Publishing (2008)

  "Intent on growing its custom publishing capabilities, Macmillan in January 2008 acquired Hayden-McNeil Publishing, which provides a turnkey custom publishing operation in the sciences." (Mickey and Meaney 2008, 147)

Product Divisions

• K-12: no
• Higher Education: yes

Summary and Brands

• Education and Science Divisions: Nature Publishing Group, Bedford/St. Martin’s, W.H. Freeman, Worth Publishers, Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Spotlight Verlag, Palgrave Macmillan, Macmillan Education, Scientific American, Verlag J.B. Metzler ('Education and Science' n.d.)
  • "Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information in print and online. NPG publishes journals, online databases and services across the life, physical and applied sciences and clinical medicine. NPG’s flagship journal Nature is a leading weekly, international scientific journal."
  • "[Bedford/St. Martin's] is an independent college publishing branch of St. Martin’s [...] Today, the publishing house leads in the field of English language, and it also produces leading history, communication studies and music titles."
  • "W.H. Freeman publishes natural sciences textbooks for colleges and high schools in the USA, drawing on the expertise of internationally renowned scientific authors."
  • "Since 1998, Worth Publishers has concentrated on the development of social science textbooks focusing on psychology, economics and sociology."
  • "Palgrave Macmillan is a global academic publisher, serving learning and training in higher education and the professional world. It has a broad publishing program which includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. Palgrave Macmillan is focused on publishing in the Humanities, the Social Sciences and Business."
  • "Macmillan Education is one of the world's leading publishers of English Language Teaching materials for teachers and students of English as a foreign or second language. Macmillan also leads the way in publishing school curriculum materials in many parts of the world, including Africa and the Caribbean."
  • "J.B. Metzler is one of Germany’s leading specialists in liberal arts publications. [...] Since the end of the Second World War it has added to and expanded its publications in history, anthropology, literary criticism, media studies, music, philosophy and languages. [...] It also publishes a wide range of textbooks and manuals as well as academic paperbacks and dictionaries."

Business Strategy

Primary Sales Targets

"The company’s primary sales targets are high-volume introductory courses at four-year colleges and universities and community colleges. The career-oriented, for-profit segment is tangential to BFW’s core target market, but the company does offer a limited line of textbooks for that segment. BFW also markets its titles to high schools and is a regular participant in state textbook adoptions." (Mickey and Meaney 2008, 146-147)

Custom Publishing

"Across Bedford, Freeman & Worth, imprints offer Tailored Learning Solutions, the company’s custom-publishing resource with a variety of options from e-book solutions to custom media packages. Bedford/St. Martin’s also offers the Bedford Select, a database of more than 600 essays, stories, poems and plays to adapt or create a textbook, readers or anthologies." (Mickey and Meaney 2008, 147)

To grow its custom publishing capabilities, in January 2008, Macmillan "acquired Hayden-McNeil Publishing, which provides a turnkey custom publishing operation in the sciences". "Hayden-McNeil’s main focus is publishing original lab manuals and notebooks, mostly in print. The company targets the largest universities and is not impacted by the used-book or rental initiatives. Materials are customized to specific courses and have little value outside those courses." "Company products reach about 700,000 students each year, and Simba estimates that annual revenue is in the $8 million range." (Mickey and Meaney 2008, 147)

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