Bertelsmann SE plans to close its bookstores and book clubs in German-speaking markets after years of declining sales,
the
Wall Street Journal
reported.
The company’s Der Club retail locations and online store will ease operations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland by the end of 2015, the article said. Bookselling was formerly the company’s core business, the report noted. After 2015, the Bertelsmann book club will be available only in Russia, Ukraine and Spain, “but no one is expecting those small niche markets to survive,” the
Journal
report said.
Bertelsmann was founded in the 19th century as a family-owned publisher. In the 1950s, Reinhard Mohn started the Bertelsmann Lesering (“reading circle”), which sold discounted books through the mail, the
Journal
article said The first retail store opened in 1964, and the book club expanded across Europe and North America. By 1992, there were more than 300 stores in Germany alone, and the book club had more than 7 million members, the article said. Today, there are only 52 stores, and sales have fallen from €700 million in the mid-1990s to €100 million.
Since the 1960s, Bertelsmann has entered other media channels, including music, magazine publishing, German television stations under RTL Group and U.S. book publisher Random House, the article said. In 2013, Bertelsmann entered into a joint venture with Pearson PLC to create Penguin Random House, the world’s largest consumer book publishing company. Bertelsmann’s Arvato unit provides business services to companies that want to outsource.
The company has been exiting bookselling over the last several years, “selling off its international book clubs in fits and starts and folding what remained of the German-language business into a separate DirectGroup unit, which was given few resources and little attention by senior management,” the
Journal
article said. (Source:
Wall Street Journal,
June 30, 2014.)
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