Magazines. Final bids for the legendary but loss-making former Time Inc magazines Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money are due in two weeks. Meredith Corp is said to be expecting up to $800m for the magazines, which are expected to be sold separately to prospective buyers including: sometime rivals Jay Penske (Variety+ Rolling Stone) and Jimmy Finkelstein (Hollywood Reporter+ The Hill) who are both believed to want Sports Illustrated and possibly Time or Money too. Other individual bidders are going for Money+ Fortune together or Time magazine alone, while several private equity firms are thought to be the only bidders for all four magazines together. But, since Meredith insiders have hinted that there are up to 10 separate bidders still in the race, there may be a number of trophy investors including Len Blavatnik and Ynon Kreiz who – like Edgar Bronfman and Rupert Murdoch – once bid for the whole of Time Inc. There seems plenty of scope for surprise bids and – perhaps – big disappointments on price.
Across the Atlantic, that’s also the expectation at the former Time Inc UK, where the company (now known as TI Media) is expected to focus strongly on its mass market and major brands (especially weeklies and TV listings) and sell-off the long tail of special interest magazines. But prospects for a quick deal with the resurgent Future Plc, the UK’s largest specialist mag-media company, seem to have collapsed. So the only recourse may be a piecemeal sale of at least 10 of the company’s 40 magazines.
TI Media may also have dropped out of the bidding for Dennis Publishing, the livewire company founded by the late Felix Dennis whose key brands include: The Week (US and UK), Buy-a-Car digital, AutoExpress, Evo and ComputerActive. The bidding may now be down to private equity firms and, from the ranks of media companies, perhaps only Hubert Burda Media. It is 18 months since the Munich-based publisher acquired the UK’s Immediate Media (publisher of the listings weekly Radio Times, Good Food, and Top Gear). The privately-owned, 115-year-old Burda has €2.7bn revenues (increased by 150% in the past 20 years), some 600 brands, with 185m users, 500m paying consumers and 12,000 employees in 20 markets around the world. It may be set to become the UK’s second largest magazine-media company. Context: How Meredith captured Time Inc
