Forbes on the Holtzbrinck's.....from a few months ago.
It appears that Germany's answer to Rupert Murdoch has quite an avaricious appetite, and I doubt that he is too intimidated by any Wall Street market monkey:.
"At any given moment, there are 50 publishers courting Holtzbrinck."
>>As two big American publishing houses worry about new owners, some wishful thinkers are wondering . . .
Where's Holtzbrinck?
By Stephan Herrera
When German media giant Bertelsmann bid an estimated $1.4 billion for Random House in April, American authors and agents scurried to the Federal Trade Commission for protection. Now the deal's on hold. When Michael Milken emerged as a leading bidder for Simon & Schuster, literary types decried this invasion by Mammon of their sacred business.
But nobody whined when Stuttgart-based Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH bought heavily into the U.S. publishing industry. Most of Holtzbrinck's U.S. publishers wanted to be bought: Henry Holt & Co., St. Martin's Press, Farrar Straus & Giroux and Scientific American magazine, for example. Scientific American's chief executive, John (Jack) Hanley, a former Holtzbrinck board member, declares: "At any given moment, there are 50 publishers courting Holtzbrinck."
Holtzbrinck is not a scholarly little outfit. Its revenues last year were $2.5 billion, which, in the world of books, makes it one of the biggest operators. What differentiates it from book publishers such as News Corp. and Viacom is that Holtzbrinck is almost exclusively in publishing. In England it owns the Macmillan Group, which includes the journal Nature. In Germany, where it was founded in 1948 as a book club by Georg von Holtzbrinck, it owns 12 book publishing houses (with 40 imprints), including 112-year-old S. Fischer Verlag, publisher of Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka. It also owns the country's largest business daily, Handelsblatt, and the highbrow general-interest weekly Die Zeit.
Why do authors and publishers love Holtzbrinck? HarperCollins canceled 106 book contracts en masse last year for authors unlikely to sell big, but Holtzbrinck's Henry Holt threw a $2 million advance at hot-potato author Salman Rushdie. When HarperCollins dumped Hong Kong's former British governor Chris Patten's memoir early this year so as not to offend the Chinese government, Macmillan snapped it up.
Holtzbrinck, however, is not old-fashioned when it comes to operations. The company spent $30 million last year building a distribution center, complete with robots, in Gordonsville, Virginia. The facility ships and processes returns in less than a week, compared with the industry's six-week norm. Holtzbrinck also sells books, plus textbook chapters, over the Web.
Yet at a time when book publishing is feeling commercial pressures as rarely before, Holtzbrinck resists them. Farrar Straus President Roger Straus turned down an offer from Random House that was worth several million dollars more than Holtzbrinck's because of the German company's integrity and reputation for letting its subsidiaries run their own show, even to the extent of bidding against each other. If they want to spend money on an author who brings prestige more than profits, that's their decision. Straus publishes 20 Nobel laureates, including Nadine Gordimer, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Derek Walcott.
As the Bertelsmann/Random House deal hit rough sailing in May, some in the industry were silently hoping that maybe, just maybe, Holtzbrinck would make a bid.
Privately owned by three Holtzbrinck family members, Dieter von Holtzbrinck, 56; Monika Schoeller, 58; and half-brother Stefan von Holtzbrinck, 34, the company keeps its affairs so secret that not even FORBES GLOBAL could find out how much money it makes.
Can you profit from doing business the Holtzbrinck way? This much is clear: It's no charitable operation. The Holtzbrincks are making their first appearance on FORBES GLOBAL'S list of billionaires, which will be published in our July 6 edition.<<
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Dieter Von Holtzbrinck and Family/Germany
Net worth: $2.8 billion
New billionaire
The onetime failed book-club entrepreneur now runs $2.5 billion sales Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck (FORBES, June 1), founded by his father. Von Holtzbrinck, 58, has some of the most coveted properties in global publishing, including Farrar Straus Giroux and the journal Nature. With two siblings, he owns 100% of this esteemed Stuttgart-based book, magazine and newspaper publisher. When not working, he's gallery-hopping with his artist wife, Richild. Also does philanthropy in Israel.
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Recent arrivals and those to watch
It's not only the American economy that has been rewarding its creative and driven business owners. Around the world, entrepreneurs have been raking in significant returns for their ideas and long hours.
The table below includes the newly "billionaired" this year. Their ages show that the road to serious wealth, often through more traditional industries, can be a long one, but that patience and tenacity pay off.
The newest big guns
Deiter von Holtzbrinck/58 Germany Publishing 2,800 Billion
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