German publishers see marginal 2015 sales rise

German booksellers and publishers did not have a stellar year in 2015 but they fared better than had been expected. While the trade association Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels will not release statistical data until later in the spring, the new ranking of the largest publishing companies has just been published, serving as an indicator how the publishing industry fared.

According to the data compiled by trade paper buchreport, the top 100 publishers managed sales of €5.71bn between them, up marginally by 0.6%. But the overall growth tells only one half of the story: buchreport’s figures show an industry in the grip of consolidation and a growing divide between trade and professional publishers.

STM, educational and professional publishing continues to be where the money is. According to buchreport these publishers reported average growth between 3% and 4% and occupied 13 of the top 15 spots. The ranking is again led by Springer which for the time reports under the Holtzbrinck umbrella - after last year’s merger of Springer and the bulk of Macmillan Science and Education. The German businesses of newly formed Springer Nature reported sales of €510.2m; figures for the global operation as a whole have not yet been published.

Trade publishing is an altogether dicier area, with sales on average down 2%. Because booksellers are their major clients, the figure is in line with the 1.6% decline of bookstore sales, measured by buchreport in 2015.

Random House, which is not part of Penguin Random House (PRH) but continues to report to PRH’s c.e.o. Markus Dohle in New York, was again the largest trade publisher and the second-largest publisher overall with sales of €329m, up 1.2%. Among major German trade publishers that reported declining sales were Holtzbrinck-owned S Fischer (-3.2%) and Rowohlt (-11.9%); sales of publicly quoted Bastei Lübbe, publisher of Dan Brown and Ken Follett, dived 12%.

Consolidation among German publishers continued apace. Buchreport listed close to 40 mergers and acquisitions during the year; apart from Springer Nature, these were mostly minor deals involving small publishers or specialist lists.