Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I'm not sure I can believe the 900 to 250 title cut. Time will tell, I guess.
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I agree.
That's why this is in discussion, not news.
But KKR has a track record, is plugged in, and this *has* happened before in publishing. Plus the randy penguin puts out over 15,000 titles a year. Cutting 650 isn't that big in their scheme of things other than (apparently) all coming from the same category.
More, a lot of mega mergers do end up like this, with the combined company producing the same or less than the bigger of the two pre-merger units. (Sometimes they end up the size of the smaller of the two.)
A classic example is the early 90's merger of HP and Apollo Computer as HP tried to catch SUN for domination in UNIX Workstations. At the time, HP was 2 and Apollo 3 and combined they outsold Sun. SUN CEO MacNeally, a pretty big ass himself, publicly approved of the deal. "This is great. Now I only have one competitor to worry about instead of two." He predicted SUN would be back at number one before HP sorted out the merger. He was right. More, IBM actually snuck into number two for a while with their first gen RS6000s.
Buying market share fails more often than not.
In this case, one of the stated goals of the merger was to gain added efficiencies through consolidation. And less staff usually goes hand in hand with less titles.
That's why I'm curious to see what the others do.
Is this solely a result of the merger or a reaction to the new normal?