RBI Flogs Scandinavian Wing For €10 Million, Cuts Still Needed
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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.
SEE ALSO: Reed Elsevier Puts Chunk Of RBI-US Up For Sale; Smith Out As CEO
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.”
Posted In: Media & Publishing, Magazines, Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Mergers & Acquisitions, Companies, Reed Elsevier
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