Contract terminated

From the Guardian:

Reed Business Information is to make 18 staff redundant as part of a restructuring that will include the closure of 130-year old Contract Journal.

This follows the pattern of death by a thousand cuts for RBI.

 

That’s the way the money goes

A neat little summary in PaidContent on some of the bigger publishers’ financials.

• NatMags: a pre-tax loss of £42.8m in 2008 – compared with a £10.8m profit in 2007
• Haymarket: pre-tax profits down from £8m in 2007 to £4.5m in 2008
• Reed Business Information: Profits fell 47% in H109 to £39m.
• UBM: In the first half of 2009, UBM’s profits fell by more than a quarter year on year to £48m.
• Centaur: First-half profits fell by 88% year on year to £1.7m.
• Euromoney: The DMGT-owned publisher has said it will meet its 2008/09 profit target of £57m for the year to 30 September.
• Future: For its H109, announced in May, Future saw its profits fall 70% to £1.2m.
• Economist Group: For the year to March 31, operating profits were 26% higher year on year at £56m.

On the Critical list

The departure of Centaur’s chairman and the company’s rejection of a bid from Critical Information Group may well be entirely unrelated, but it’s clear that the company probably won’t see out much of 2010 with its current ownership arrangements.

CIG apparently describes itself as “a company formed to acquire and consolidate media companies and businesses”.

I wonder how many more jobs will be ‘consolidated’ out of Centaur if and when CIG move in?

Axer axed

After 25 years and being the hatchet man for 20% of the workforce, it must rankle to be pushed out of the door as an ‘overhead burden‘. I wonder if Simon Middleboe will use this endorsement on his c.v.?

And after their great performance with Incisive and EMAP, I wonder if there are any people over at Apax who are also new on the jobs market?

We are all publishers now

Some good news from the Incisive crash and burn – each of us now has a stake in the spun-off American Lawyer Media. Part of the deal is that RBS gets 49% of ALM; as we, through the Government, own 70% of RBS we now each have a $3 piece of the company.

With such watertight investments like Incisive, it’s amazing that the Royal Bank of Scotland needed a government bale out.

Incisive blunted

From the FT:

Incisive Media, the business-to-business publisher, is splitting into two. Apax Partners, its private equity owner, will keep control of the American Lawyer Media business in the US, while banks will take over the struggling UK arm.

Apart from putting the final torch to Tim Weller’s plans for global domination (and how long does anyone think he’ll stay in position after Incisive’s lenders move in?) this is likely to presage a good deal of, er, rationalisation of Incisive’s products.

Business failure

Calling yourself “The equivalent of What Car Magazine for specifiers of business machinery” must have sounded like a great statement when it was first coined by the publishers of What to Buy for Business.

In the past 18 months What Car has lost over 20,000 copies, and something similar must have happened to its emulator; W2B4B (as it irritatingly called itself) has just fallen to the industry’s magazine scrappage scheme.

Euro (less) money

According to the their latest trading statement, total revenues are down 11% at Euromoney – or an unpleasant 22% when one factors in the poor performance of the pound.

And there’s more.

As expected, the rate of subscription revenue growth is now declining …  The declines in advertising, sponsorship and delegate revenues, …, have continued at similar rates to those experienced in the second quarter.

So, the stuff that was doing badly continues to cause pain and the stuff that was going okay has started tanking.

Dive, dive, dive.

A fab graph from Silicon Alley Insider showing the decline in ad revenue for various US business magazines:

Couple that with a report in the FT that BusinessWeek might be put on the market for just $1 and you have a range of problems for some top brands.

Worthless

Interesting times over at Greater London House.

First Apax partners, who bought the B2B side of EMAP with the Guardian after the consumer divisions got sold off to Bauer, wrote down its investment in the company to zero.

Then Neil Bradford, co-chief executive of Emap Data and Insight, left the company suddenly.

And now EMAP Inform (the ink on paper bit) announces another 35 job losses.  40 jobs went at the end of last year, so the two rounds of redundancies will mean that the group has got rid of around 20% of its workforce in the past nine months.