Graham Holdings Company

Graham Holdings Company
Public
Traded as Class A Common Stock: unlisted
Class B Common Stock: NYSE: GHC
Industry Mass media
Founded August 4, 1947 (as The Washington Post Company)
November 29, 2013 (as Graham Holdings Company)
Headquarters Arlington, Virginia, U.S.
Key people
 Donald E. Graham
(Chairman and CEO)
Timothy J. O’Shaughnessy (president)
Hal S. Jones
(CFO)
Products Magazines
Educational Services
Television
Cable television
Electronic media
Revenue Increase US$ 3.49 billion (2013)[1]
Increase US$ 346 million (2013)[1]
Increase US$ 236 million (2013)[1]
Total assets Decrease US$ 5.811 billion (2013)[1]
Total equity Decrease US$ 3.300 billion (2013)[1]
Number of employees
 14,000, full-time basis(2013)[1]
Website www.ghco.com

Coordinates: 38°53′38″N 77°04′21″W / 38.893755°N 77.072568°W / 38.893755; -77.072568

Graham Holdings Company (formerly The Washington Post Company) is a diversified American conglomerate, best known for formerly owning the newspaper for which it was once named, The Washington Post, and Newsweek.

Its holdings include the online magazine Slate, Graham Media Group (formerly Post-Newsweek Stations), a group of five large-market television stations, higher education company Kaplan, and Trove (formerly WaPo Labs)—the developers of a news reader app. Graham Holdings Company also owned cable television and internet service provider Cable One until it was spun off in 2015.

Corporate history

The history of Graham Holdings Company dates back to 1877, when the Post was first published. The Washington Post Company was incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1889,[2] and remained a District of Columbia corporation until it changed its place of incorporation to Delaware in 2003.[3] It is a public company and its Class B common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GHC; it went public in 1971.

Descendents of the late Eugene Meyer (including Chairman and CEO Donald E. Graham, his sister Lally Weymouth, and the beneficiaries of various family trusts) collectively control the company through their ownership of the unlisted Class A common stock that selects 70% of the company's board of directors. As of 2014, it forms more than 90% of the family's assets.[4] Prior to 2014, Berkshire Hathaway was a substantial holder of the public Class B common stock that selects 30% of the company's board of directors, but exchanged most of that stock for WPLG-TV, one of Graham Holdings' television stations, and other assets, in 2014.[4]

2013 sale of The Washington Post

On August 5, 2013 it was announced that the Washington Post Company would sell the flagship newspaper for $250 million to Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com. The Washington Post Company agreed to adopt a new corporate name once the sale was finalized. It adopted Graham Holdings Company as the new name effective November 29, 2013.[5] Amazon.com was not involved in the sale.[6] Nash Holdings LLC, a company owned by Bezos, closed the purchase of the newspaper and affiliated publications on October 1, 2013.[7][8] Graham Holdings Company retained ownership of WaPo Labs, its technology innovation group,[9] since rebranded as Trove.

Since 1950, the company had been based in the Washington Post building in Washington, D.C., which was sold off separately in 2014. Its new headquarters are at 1300 North 17th Street in Arlington, Virginia, with the choice of state motivated (according to Don Graham) by the proximity to Congress and the fact that two of the holding's activity areas, education and health care, are subject to federal regulation.[4]

In 2014, Tim O'Shaughnessy joined GHC as president, the founder of LivingSocial and a son-in-law of CEO Don Graham.[4]

Education

The Education area yielded 61% of GHC's revenue in 2014.[4] Kaplan, Inc. is one of the world's largest providers of educational services. Kaplan focuses on three areas: higher education, professional training, and test preparation. Headquartered in New York City, Kaplan had $2.2 billion in revenue in 2013.[10]

StudentAdvisor.com is the latest education resource launched by Graham Holdings Company. StudentAdvisor.com is an education research (reviews written by students, alumni, and parents) and comparison destination (tools to download and compare multiple colleges) for students, parents, and lifetime learners.

Broadcasting

Main article: Graham Media Group

Through its Graham Media Group subsidiary (formerly Post-Newsweek Stations),[11] Graham Holdings owns a group of five television stations. Based in Detroit, Graham Media Group is led by chief executive officer Emily L. Barr.

Stations

Stations are arranged in alphabetical order by state and city of license.

City of License / Market Station Channel
TV (RF)		 Owned since Primary affiliation
Jacksonville WJXT 4 (42) 1953 Independent
Orlando - Daytona Beach - Melbourne WKMG-TV 6 (26) 1997 CBS
Detroit WDIV 4 (45) 1978 NBC
Houston KPRC-TV 2 (35) 1994 NBC
San Antonio KSAT-TV 12 (12) 1994 ABC

Cable

Cable ONE is an Internet and cable television provider based in the Phoenix, Arizona, area serving over 730,000 customers in 19 states.

In November 2014, Graham Holdings said it would spin off Cable ONE as a separate, publicly traded company in 2015.[12] The spin-off was completed on July 1st, 2015.[13]

Interactive

Graham Holdings Company also owns three firms active in various capacities on the World Wide Web. These include The Slate Group, which publishes Slate, Slate V, and ForeignPolicy.com.[14] The Root, an online magazine focusing on African American culture, used to be held by The Slate Group until Graham Holdings sold it to Univision Communications in 2015.[15] Graham Holdings Company also owns SocialCode, an advertising agency specializing in Facebook and Twitter marketing.

Health care

In October 2012, the firm purchased Celtic Healthcare Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Celtic Healthcare, based in Pennsylvania, provides home health care in western, central, and northeastern Pennsylvania as well as Montgomery and Baltimore County, Maryland. It also provides home hospice services in the same areas, as well as owns a 10-bed inpatient hospice in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.[16] In 2014, it had around 558 full-time and 45 part-time employees.[4]

In 2014, Graham Holdings bought a majority stake in Troy, Michigan-based Residential Healthcare Group, the parent company of Residential Home Health and Residential Hospice, which provides at-home and on-site health care and hospice services in Michigan and Illinois.[17]

Energy production

In July 2013, Graham Holdings purchased Forney Corp. for an undisclosed sum. The company, which is based in Addison, Texas, manufactures equipment that monitors and controls the combustion of coal, natural gas, and other materials. This equipment is sold to electric utilities for use in power generation plants.[18]

Manufacturing

In June 2014, Graham Holdings acquired Joyce/Dayton Corp., a Dayton, Ohio-based manufacturer of screw jacks and other linear motion systems.[19]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "2013 Form 10-K, Graham Holdings Company". United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
  2. ↑ District of Columbia Corporation records show the original Washington Post Company was registered as a domestic corporation in 1889
  3. ↑ District of Columbia Corporation records show the original D.C.-based corporation's charter was revoked in 2003 and replaced by a Delaware-based foreign corporation.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Graham Holdings: 2014 Annual Report (available on GHCO.com)
  5. ↑ Wilgoren, Debbi. "Washington Post Co. Renamed Graham Holdings Company to Mark Sale of Newspaper." Washington Post. November 18, 2013. Accessed 2013-11-18.
  6. ↑ Farhi, Paul (August 6, 2013). "Washington Post to be sold to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon". Washington Post. Retrieved 6 August 2013.
  7. ↑ Fahri, Paul (October 1, 2013). "The Washington Post Closes Sale to Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos". The Washington Post (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post). ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved October 1, 2013. Bezos’s $250 million purchase was completed as expected with the signing of sale documents. The signing transfers the newspaper and other assets from The Washington Post Co. to Nash Holdings, Bezos’s private investment company.
  8. ↑ Clabaugh, Jeff (October 1, 2013). "Jeff Bezos Completes Washington Post Acquisition". Washington Business Journal (American City Business Journals). Retrieved October 1, 2013. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now officially the head of a newspaper, completing his $250 million acquisition of the Washington Post’s publishing business Tuesday afternoon.
  9. ↑ http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/what-is-wapo-labs/2013/08/06/2790de64-feea-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_gallery.html#item0
  10. ↑ http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9MjI2ODA4fENoaWxkSUQ9LTF8VHlwZT0z&t=1
  11. ↑ "Washington Post's former TV arm changes name to Graham Media Group". Chicago Tribune. 28 July 2014. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  12. ↑ Clabaugh, Jeff (November 13, 2014). "Graham Holdings to spin off cable business". Washington Business Journal. Retrieved November 13, 2014.
  13. ↑ "Graham Holdings Completes Spin-off of Cable ONE". Business Wire. Retrieved 2 August 2015.
  14. ↑ "The Washington Post Company Announces The Slate Group." Washington Post. June 4, 2008.
  15. ↑ Bond, Shannon (2015-05-21). "Univision buys African-American news site The Root". Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766. Retrieved 2015-05-24.
  16. ↑ Clabaugh, Jeff. "Washington Post Enters Hospice Business With Purchase of Celtic Healthcare." Washington Business Journal. October 1, 2012. Accessed 2013-11-18.
  17. ↑ Harrison, J.D. "Graham Holdings wades deeper into residential health care business." Washington Post. July 3, 2014. Accessed 2015-10-17.
  18. ↑ Clabaugh, Jeff. "Washington Post Buys Utility Products Company." Washington Business Journal. July 18, 2013. Accessed 2013-11-18.
  19. ↑ "Graham Holdings acquires Joyce/Dayton Corp." Today's Energy Solutions. June 2, 2014. Accessed 2015-10-17.

External links

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