Wolters Kluwer Group

Overview

This profile considers the Wolters Kluwer publishing group.

It covers -

• introduction
• holdings
• studies

Introduction

Netherlands-based Wolters Kluwer is a specialist publisher active in 25 countries, competing in particular with Elsevier (a proposed merger with Elsevier was abandoned in 1998), Springer Science+Business Media, Blackwell, Thomson and Wiley.

Its corporate site is here.

As of 2001 it was responsible for over 700 journals and 23,000 book titles. Core activities were legal and tax publishing, business publishing, medical/scientific publishing, educational publishing/ professional training, trade publishing for selected markets. It had sales of approximately US$2.5 billion and some 19,000 employees. Print products accounted for around 70% of revenue. Sales in 2005 were €3.4 billion, with 18,400 employees worldwide

In 2002 Wolters Kluwer sold Kluwer Academic Publishers for US$591 million to London-based private equity funds Candover and Cinven, which subsequently acquired BertelsmannSpringer from Bertelsmann for €1.05bn. The two funds announced plans to merge Kluwer Academic Publishers and BertelsmannSpringer. That merger was effected in late 2003 as Springer Science + Business Media (unrelated to the Axel Springer mass media conglomerate).

Holdings

An indication of Kluwer units is here.

Studies

For Kluwer's history see Four windows of opportunity: a study in publishing (Amsterdam: Wolters Kluwer 1995) edited by Johan de Vries.

Lippincott is profiled in J. Stuart Freeman's Toward a Third Century: An Informal History of the J.B. Lippincott Company on the Occasion of its Two-Hundredth Anniversary (Philadelphia: Lippincott 1992).