Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

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Quercus for sale

UK publisher Quercus is looking for a new owner, putting itself up for sale just days after announcing that it was expecting to record a ‘significant trading loss’ for 2013, reports the Bookseller. The independent company, which is best-known as the publisher of Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ series, said in an announcement to the UK stock market this week that it has decided ‘it would be in the best interests of the company’s shareholders to seek potential offers by means of a formal sale process’. The announcement follows an interim trading statement, released earlier this month, that said the publisher’s sales in the final quarter of 2013 were ‘lower than expected’ due to ‘continuing issues within the book trade, which led retailers to adopt very conservative ordering policies’ and ‘a lower than expected upturn in digital sales over the Christmas period to the end of the year’. CEO and co-founder Mark Smith, who owns 14% of the company, told the London Evening Standard that ‘it feels like we’d be better off within a bigger organisation’. ‘The publishing industry seems to be polarising around very big and very small companies [and] it’s difficult for companies of our size,’ said Smith.

 

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Category: International news