Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Deals: Wolters Kluwer

Wednesday was the day that offers were due to be submitted for the Wolters Kluwer educational assets. According to Reuters, the interested parties include Pearson Education and Wendel Investissement (French Educational company) and a number of private equity firms. Reuters went on to suggest that the company could fetch close to a $Billion.

It is hard to see which way this one will go. My guess is on one of the operators rather than PE. The unit is small relative to the other companies on the market and has some fairly specialized publishing programs which could limit effective cost restructuring and limit the potential for closer integration with a second follow-on acquisition. The integration with an existing publisher, such as Pearson, could be similar to a list acquisition meaning they could effectively eliminate all expenses other than those directly attributable to content development.

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