Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS) has been active again in carving up more of Granada Learning. This time it has sold off David Fulton Publishers to Informa plc. We presume this will either be run as a standalone brand within Informa’s Academic and Scientific division alongside Taylor & Francis or as a subset of Routledge.
 
The amount paid by Informa was £4.642m plus costs and a working capital adjustment. This means VSS will have only raised about £16.4m from selling off David Fulton, Letts Education and Leckie & Leckie leaving them needing to raise somewhere between £18m and £36m to simply break even. The difference in the two amounts is because the sale price paid by VSS was £35m up front plus another £18m depending on various performance targets being met (which seems unlikely).
 
Realistically the most valuable asset left is nfer Nelson, and even if VSS sell a rolled-up Blackcat, Smerc and Sherston, they are still looking at achieving a very large number in a weak market. At this level there are really only two players who might be interested in nfer Nelson, and they are Reed Elsevier and Pearson.
 
During the protracted sale of Granada Learning, either company could have outbid VSS if they really wanted nfer Nelson but they didn’t. That means they either think VSS paid too much or they aren’t fussed about owning the company.
 
Either way this puts all the pressure back on VSS, although fortunately for VSS’s backers, Marco Sodi and his London team seem very adept at magically pulling rabbits out of their financial hat.
 
One anomaly in this story is that Roger Horton, CEO of the Taylor & Francis Group, a subsidiary of Informa plc, was quoted in The Bookseller on September 15 saying, ‘it’s an ideal fit’. This seems odd, because it seems to show that Informa is happy for its senior management to discuss the sale in the media, but seems not to think shareholders deserve the same consideration.
 
www.fultonpublishers.co.uk
www.informa.com
www.nfer-nelson.co.uk
www.vss.com