Magazine-media. The fast-growing UK-based specialist media company Future plc is paying $132.5m to acquire the B2C business of Purch, a US digital publisher in technology and science, with brands including Tom’s Guide, Tom’s Hardware, Top Ten Reviews, and Live Science. Purch, which made 2017 Ebitda profit of $10.1m on $46m revenue, has developed content-based affiliate e-commerce similar to Future’s. It has also built advertising technology to generate best prices in real-time through trading exchanges, which the UK company will now roll-out across its whole UK-US-Australia portfolio. Future was founded 33 years ago in picture-postcard Bath by TED Talks pioneer Chris Anderson. Its 19 years as a UK public company have never been dull. It soared to a £1bn valuation in 2000, 12 months after IPO, before crashing to earth. It recovered in the early years of the century but then suffered from print disruption, M&A that didn’t quite deliver, global over-reach, and high overheads. The company’s chequered history, though, was rooted in its long-time dependence on the once-booming newsstand sales of premium-priced print magazines with cover-mounted discs and computer games. Ouch. The company has always had technology smarts (its 10-year-old TechRadar has some 30m monthly uniques) but it has taken current CEO Zillah Byng-Thorne (ex AutoTrader) to do the deals and pick the people that have shifted the centre of gravity from print towards e-commerce and events. Her painstaking four-year strategy demonstrates that media transformation often depends on buying enough building blocks to change the operational balance of a legacy business. Future’s deal-making has enabled it to squeeze the profits out of a still large print portfolio while acquiring and developing new skills, technologies and services without the risk of suffocation by the old guard. The company has also pushed its print-centric content strongly towards the reviews, lists and buyers’ guides which attract online audiences and propel e-commerce. But shareholders (some of whom date back to Future’s life-support rights issue in 2001) can still get jittery. Despite a share price which has soared 60% in the past year, it has fallen back 12% in the last few days. US acquisitions can do that for British companies, and the Purch deal is also being cautiously funded by a deeply-discounted rights issue. Although two-thirds of Future’s £15m profit currently comes from its home market, this latest acquisition should swing the balance sharply to the US – where the majority of the UK company’s online audience (and 200 of its staff) are already based. Specialist consumer media and the £250m Future Plc – one of its liveliest stars – are looking good.
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Future’s big splash in the US
