[This post has been updated] The business-to-business magazine media in Canada is significantly altered with the announcement late Friday that Glacier Media Inc. has sold off most of its trade media magazine properties in Toronto-based Business Information Group (BIG) to Annex Business Media and Newcom Business Media for $19.65 million.
Annex and Newcom now acquire 67 trade publications, related websites and other digital assets, giving it more than 100 properties and an additional 230 employees. With that, what had been the largest privately owned b2b company has made another major leap to become the biggest b2b publishing company in Canada. Annex has a reputation for running very lean operations, sharing such things as production, circulation, digital, administration and sales.
[Update: Newcom Business Media, which is a family-owned company started in 1987, acquired 18 print and digital publications and two trade shows as part of the deal, including Truck News, Truck West and Motor Truck Fleet Executive. These will now join Newcom's other transport-related titles Today's Trucking, Truck and Trailer and Transport Routier. Also acquired were Scott's Directories and titles in dental,insurance industries and meetings and travel.
Ownership of the new acquisitions will be evenly distributed between the two companies. “It’s called the Annex-Newcom limited partnership.” Annex CEO Mike Fredericks [told Mastheadonline] “We’re 50/50 partners with Alex Papanou (BIG vp) operating it as our president. We will continue to operate our private companyies—effectively it’s a third company that sits between us.
With the acquisition comes the inevitability of similar titles being in direct competition with each other. “We’re going to take our time to study the marketplace and see what’s best,” Fredericks said. “So in the next number of months it will be business as usual and they will continue to compete with each other.”]
With this transaction, Glacier effectively exits a huge swath of the b2b sector (with the exception of Food In Canada, the Northern Miner and the ERIS environmental data company, which it is keeping.) And in the process it is unloading publications it took over in 2006 in the breakup of Conrad Black's Hollinger Canadian Newspapers, Limited, of which BIG was a subsidiary. Some of the other titles being sold now to Annex were bought by Glacier in 2011 in a purchase from Rogers Publishing Limited.
Read more »Labels: acquisitions. business to business, Annex, b2b, Glacier Media Inc.
