| Type | Dual-listed public limited company / Naamloze vennootschap |
|---|---|
| Traded as | LSE: REL, Euronext: REN, NYSE: ENL, NYSE: RUK |
| Industry | Publishing |
| Founded | Merger of Elsevier and Reed International PLC in 1993 |
| Headquarters | London and Amsterdam |
| Key people | Anthony Habgood (Chairman), Erik Engstrom (CEO) |
| Products | Academic and business publishing, trade fairs |
| Revenue | £6.055 billion (2010)[1] |
| Operating income | £1.090 billion (2010)[1] |
| Net income | £642 million (2010)[1] |
| Total assets | £11.16 billion (end 2010)[1] |
| Total equity | £1.970 billion (end 2010)[1] |
| Employees | 30,200 (end 2010)[1] |
| Subsidiaries | Elsevier LexisNexis Reed Exhibitions Reed Business Information |
| Website | www.reedelsevier.com |
Reed Elsevier is a publisher and information provider operating in the science, medical, legal, risk and business sectors. It is listed on several of the world's major stock exchanges. It is a FTSE 100 and FT Global 500 company.[2] The Reed Elsevier group is a dual-listed company consisting of Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV.[3]
Contents |
The company came into being in Autumn 1992 as the result of a merger between Reed International, a British trade book and magazine publisher, and the Dutch science publisher Elsevier.[4]
In 1894, Albert E. Reed established a newsprint manufacture at Tovil Mill near Maidstone, Kent.[5] In 1903, Albert E Reed was registered as a public company.[5] In 1970, Albert E. Reed merged with the International Publishing Corporation and the company name was changed to Reed International Limited.[5] The company originally grew by merging with other publishers and produced high quality trade journals as IPC Business Press Ltd and women's and other consumer magazines as IPC magazines Ltd.[5] The original family owners, the Reeds, were Methodists and encouraged good working conditions for their staff in the then-dangerous print trade.
In 1880, Jacobus George Robbers started a publishing company called NV Uitgeversmaatschappij Elsevier (Elsevier Publishing Company NV) to publish literary classics and the encyclopedia Winkler Prins.[5] Robbers named the company after the old Dutch printers family Elzevir,[5] which, for example, published the works of Erasmus in 1587. Elsevier NV originally was based in Rotterdam but moved to Amsterdam in the late 1880s.
Up to the 1930s, Elsevier remained a small family-owned publisher, with no more than ten employees. After the war it launched the weekly Elseviers Weekblad, which turned out to be very profitable. A rapid expansion followed. Elsevier Press Inc. started in 1951 in Houston, Texas, and in 1962 publishing offices were opened in London and New York. Multiple mergers in the 1970s led to name changes, settling at Elsevier Scientific Publishers in 1979. In 1991, two years before the merger with Reed, Elsevier acquired Pergamon Press in the UK.[6]
In February 2007, Reed Elsevier announced its intention to sell Harcourt, its educational publishing division.[7] On 4 May 2007 Pearson, the international education and information company, announced that it had agreed to acquire Harcourt Assessment and Harcourt Education International from Reed Elsevier for $950m in cash.[8] In July 2007, Reed Elsevier announced its agreement to sell the remaining Harcourt Education business, including international imprint Heinemann, to Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group for $4b in cash and stock.[9]
In February 2008, shareholders of Choicepoint voted in favor of acquisition by Reed Elsevier for $4.1 billion. Choicepoint is an American data aggregation company with personal files on more than 220 million people in the US and Latin America. The acquisition was completed in September 2008.[10]
In July 2009, Reed Elsevier announced its intention to sell most of its North American trade publications, including Publishers Weekly, Broadcasting & Cable, and Multichannel News, although it planned to retain Variety.[11]
In September 2009 Reed Elsevier's Technology Division ('RETS'), who provide internal IT support across all business units, announced that European support services would be outsourced to the Indian firm HCL.[12]
In April 2010, Reed Elsevier announced that it had sold 21 US magazines to other owners in recent months, and that an additional 23 US trade magazines, including Restaurants & Institutions, Hotels, and Trade Show Week would cease publication. The closures were mostly due to the weak economy including an advertising slump.[13][14]
In September 2011 Reed Elsevier agreed to purchase U.S. online-data business Accuity Holdings Inc. from investment firm Investcorp for £343 million ($530.1 million) in cash. The deal is expected to close in Q4 2011.[15]
Reed Elsevier conducts its business through the following divisions:
ScienceDirect contains over 25% of the world's science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information.
Scopus is the world's largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources. Scopus is updated daily.
Reed Business Information, Reed Elsevier's global Business division, is a provider of magazines, exhibitions, directories, online media and marketing services across five continents. Its prestige brands serve professionals across a diverse range of industries. These brands include Variety, New Scientist, totaljobs.com, Elsevier, ICIS and XpertHR.
Reed Elsevier has been criticised for the high prices of its journals and services, especially Elsevier and LexisNexis. Members of the scientific community have called for a boycott of Elsevier journals and a move to open access publications such as those of the Public Library of Science or BioMed Central.[16]
Members of the medical and scientific communities, which purchase and use many journals published by Reed Elsevier, agitated for the company to cut its links to the arms trade. Two UK academics, Dr. Tom Stafford of Sheffield University and Dr Nick Gill, launched petitions calling on Reed Elsevier to stop organising arms fairs. [17][18] A subsidiary, Spearhead, organised defence shows, including an event where it was reported that cluster bombs and extremely powerful riot control equipment were offered for sale.[19][20]
In February 2007, Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, published an editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, arguing that Reed Elsevier's involvement in both the arms trade and medical publishing constituted a conflict of interest.[21] He suggested that if academics began to disengage with Reed Elsevier, the company would be likely to end their arms fairs, as arms fairs only comprise a small proportion of their business.
On 1 June 2007, Reed Elsevier announced that they would be exiting the Defence Exhibition business during the second half of 2007.[22]
This means that the company no longer organises arms fairs around the world. The decision followed a high-profile campaign, co-ordinated by CAAT, which highlighted the incompatibility of Reed's involvement in the arms trade and their position as the number one publisher of medical and science journals and other publications. CAAT welcomed the decision and applauded the board of Reed Elsevier for recognising the concerns of its stakeholders.[23]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||