| Parent company | Time Inc. |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1963 |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Headquarters location | London |
| Publication types | Magazines, Comic magazines (defunct) |
| Official website | www.ipcmedia.com |
IPC Media (formerly International Publishing Corporation),[1] a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Inc., is a consumer magazine and digital publisher in the United Kingdom, with a large portfolio selling over 350 million copies each year.
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The British magazine publishing industry in the mid-1950s was dominated by a handful of companies, principally the Associated Newspapers (founded by Lord Harmsworth in 1890), Odhams Press Ltd, George Newnes Publishers, C. Arthur Pearson, and the Hulton Press, which fought each other for market share in a highly competitive marketplace.
In 1958 Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of a newspaper group which included the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial (now the Sunday Mirror), together with provincial chain West of England Newspapers, made an offer for Associated Press. The offer was accepted, and in January 1959 he was appointed its chairman. Within a few months he changed its name to Fleetway Publications, Ltd. after the name of its headquarters, Fleetway House in London's Farringdon Street.[2]
Shortly thereafter, Odhams Press absorbed both George Newnes and the Hulton Press. King saw an opportunity in this to rationalise the overcrowded women's magazine market, in which Fleetway and Newnes were the major competitors, and made a bid for Odhams on behalf of Fleetway that was too attractive to ignore. Fleetway took over Odhams in March 1961.[3]
In consequence, King controlled publishing interests which included two national daily and two national Sunday newspapers (the newspaper interests being informally tagged The Mirror Group), along with almost one hundred consumer magazines, more than two hundred trade and technical periodicals, and various book publishing interests. This included the combined business interests of Fleetway, Odhams, and Newnes.
All of the companies involved had been acquired without any significant change in management, save for the appointment of Mirror Group directors as chairmen. In 1963 all the companies were combined by the creation of a parent (or "holding") company called the International Publishing Corporation (known informally as IPC). All of the existing companies would continue to exist, but as IPC subsidiaries.[4][5]
IPC then set up a management development department in 1965, to rationalise its holdings, so that its various subsidiaries would no longer be in competition with each other for the same markets. This led to a reorganisation of the Group, in 1968, into six divisions:
All the divisions were headed by chairmen who originated in Mirror Group, except for Hamlyn, Quick and McIntosh.
Also in 1968, a boardroom coup replaced Cecil King with his deputy chairman, Hugh Cudlipp, a former newspaper editor.
Cudlipp had no interest in management, and was uneasy both with his new role and with IPC's diversification into computerised publication and other new technology. In 1969 he therefore proposed to former Mirror Group director Don Ryder, who was then chairman of the Reed Group, in which IPC had a 30% shareholding, to mount a reverse take-over of IPC by Reed.
IPC-Mirror Group was thus itself taken over in 1970, by the paper-making company Albert E Reed, which then renamed itself Reed International.[6] In 1974, part of the publishing interests of Reed International were separated into IPC Magazines Ltd (comprising the magazine and comics holdings) and Mirror Group Newspapers (comprising the newspaper holdings). The latter was sold to Pergamon Holdings Ltd, a private company owned by Robert Maxwell, in 1984.[7]
In the early 1990s IPC launched Loaded, which began a wave of "lad's mags".
In 1992, following a merger with Dutch science publisher Elsevier NV, Reed International underwent a further name change, becoming Reed Elsevier.
In 1987, part of the comics holdings of IPC Magazines Ltd (comprising those comics and characters created after 1 January 1970, plus 26 specified characters from Buster, which was then still being published) were placed in a separate company, Fleetway Publications, which was sold to Pergamon Holdings.[8][5]
In 1991, Egmont UK purchased Fleetway from Pergamon, merging it with their own comics publishing operation, London Editions, to form Fleetway Editions. The latter was absorbed into the main Egmont brand by 2000, having sold off the continuing titles (such as 2000 AD), and continued with only reprint and licensed titles (e.g. Sonic The Comic). IPC had retained the other comics characters and titles, i.e. those created before 1970 (except the 26 characters from Buster), including Sexton Blake, The Steel Claw, and Battler Britton[5] One character, Dan Dare, was sold separately and is currently owned by the Dan Dare Corporation.
In 1998 IPC Magazines Ltd was subject to a management buyout financed by Cinven, a venture capital group, and the company was renamed IPC Media. Cinven then sold the company to Time Inc., the magazine publishing subsidiary of Time Warner, in 2001.[9] In January 2009 the company's chief executive became Evelyn Webster, replacing Sylvia Auton who had run it since 2001.
IPC Media groups its current titles under three magazine divisions each focusing on a core audience.[10]
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