RBI Flogs Scandinavian Wing For €10 Million, Cuts Still Needed
It’s another sell-off from B2B publisher Reed Business Information, but is it enough? The Reed Elsevier-owned company has sold its Scandinavian wing for €10 million (£9.2 million) to PE firm GMT, as FT.com reports. The B2B magazines and sites will be merged with GMT’s DOCUgroup which has titles in Sweden and Germany.
This follows RBI’s sale of TWgroup, publisher of Travel Weekly, and the sell-off of a large portion of RBI US, after an attempt to sell the whole RBI division fizzled out last December due to a high valuation and credit-crunched financing plans. Since then Reed decided to keep RBI’s flagship brands—New Scientist and Variety among them—and sell assets where possible instead of selling the division as a whole.
These sell-offs are positive steps, but the RBI sell—offs won’t have impacted Reed’s debt-laden balance sheet much at all: the company raised £800 million in a rights issue in July in an attempt to meet a debt payment of $1 billion (£627 million) due in 2011. It’s already paid off $2.3 billion in debt—accumulated through the Choicepoint acquisition last year—but as RBI CEO Keith Jones wrote in an internal memo last month, the division needs “additional cost-cutting fast.”
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Posted In: Media & Publishing, Magazines, Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Mergers & Acquisitions, Companies, Reed Elsevier
