De Gruyter
Today, De Gruyter, a family-owned academic publisher with a global reach and a leading provider of publishing services for the academic community, and Brill, a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law and Biology, announced their intention to join forces.
The transaction creates the leading academic publisher in the Humanities and presents a unique opportunity to accelerate organic growth and achieve necessary scale. With pro forma combined revenues of around EUR 134 million and 750 employees, the combination will be well-positioned to offer the best possible service and infrastructure to its communities.
The combination will jointly publish well over 3,500 books and 800 journals per year. The enlarged scale will accelerate a transition to new business models, such as open access, and finance investments in technology for end-to-end workflows and a state-of-the-art market-facing (content) platform. Furthermore, it will make the business more resilient, allow more effective sales & marketing and increase the ability to attract and retain talent.
The combination of two centuries-old publishing houses will be branded De Gruyter Brill, signalling the importance of the strong heritage and family background of both companies. We at Park 56 are extremely proud to have served as De Gruyter’s exclusive financial advisor in this landmark transaction. We would like to congratulate Carsten Buhr, Christopher Radloff, Marcia Schwartz, Kathrin Müllenbach, Pablo Dominguez Andersen and all other members of the De Gruyter team. We would also like to congratulate Jasmin Lange of Brill with her role as Chief Publishing Officer of the new combination. We wish everyone involved much success with getting this transaction to a successful close in the next few months and a great journey thereafter.