Magazines group Future Plc made losses of £7m in 2014, the year its CEO was appointed. Last year, the 35-year-old specpub made £52m operating profit and is now valued at £1.4bn – a p.e. of 160x . The dizzy rating reflects Zillah Byng-Thorne’s six-year success in energetically extracting value from a succession of UK and…
Will The Athletic win the race?
The four-year-old subscription sports app The Athletic this week announced an additional fundraising of $50m, bringing total investment to almost $140m and its current valuation to some $500m. The fundraising prompted co-founder and CEO Alex Mather to declare that “The Athletic’s launch in the UK was our biggest ever and we have been blown away…
Moving beyond B2B media
B2B media companies might have missed some sparkling corporate news this week. A six-year-old, UK-based company called Learning Technologies Group Plc (LTG) announced that its 2019 revenues had increased by 38% and EBITDA by 58%. Naturally, shareholders loved it and LTG’s market cap leapt to £1bn, making it one of the largest (and fastest growing)…
Xilam buys Cube Creative
Xilam Animation, France-based producer and distributor of animated programming across Europe, has bought a 50.1% share of Cube Creative, founded in 2002, which produces animated short films, large format films, series and music videos. The acquisition expands Xilam’s strengths in CGI and 3D animation. The company already employs 40 people, in France and Vietnam. Xilam
Amplity buys health data
Amplity Health has acquired RealHealthData which will be integrated into Amplity Insights. Both companies are based in the US. RealHealthData focusses on technology which can capture real world data and augments the service Amplity provides to pharmaceutical clients. Amplity
Kelsey buys Motorsport News
Privately-owned UK specpub Kelsey Media has purchased the weekly newspaper Motorsport News from Motorsport Network, the Miami, US-based online racing portal and e-sports network which had acquired it from Haymarket Media Group in 2016 together with Autosport, F1 Racing, and Motorsport. com. It was believed that the Haymarket Motorsports Group had been sold for some…
Scopely buys Fox games
California-based Scopely, an entertainment and mobile games company (with gaming titles which include Star Trek), has acquired FoxNext Games from Disney. Disney had acquired the company as part of its 2019 acquisition of Fox. FoxNext has produced games for Marvel, Aliens, X-Files, Avatar and Titanic. Scopely now has over 800 employees in the US, Europe…
UK newspapers feel US heat
UK newspapers hardly resemble the US market. The old Fleet Street national brands still dominate UK dailies and even the most historic regional newspapers are disintegrating faster than anyone could have guessed. Who would have predicted that The Scotsman, which was selling more than 100k copies in 2000, would shrink to a mere 12k in…
Meredith buys SwearBy
The $1.5bn Meredith Corporation, the largest magazine publisher in the US, has acquired the SwearBy recommendation website. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Meredith reaches 100m US women each month including 90% of millennials. SwearBy is a site where women share personal experience with products that they “swear by”. The deal is Meredith’s…
Wanderlust-Where merger
Morris Communications Company, of the US, and Think Publishing, of the UK, are merging their respective subsidiaries Morris Visitor Publications Europe and Wanderlust Publications. The new company will be called Think Travel. Its brands include: Wanderlust, Where London, Where Paris, and the London Planner. Despite the joint ownership of the new company, the branding implies it…
