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Hachette parent company Lagardère outlines plans to cut costs in the publishing division
Hachette parent company Lagardère has outlined plans to cut costs in the publishing division, rethinking title count and pricing. It is also stopping its distribution revamp in France.
In a call with investors after releasing its 2023 results, Hachette Livre deputy c.e.o. Stéphanie Ferran said the outlook for 2024 will be “flat in revenue and flat in EBIT”, which, she explained, “is in itself a challenge and a very ambitious target because we’ve just ended two exceptional years in terms of results”.
She said the company plans to achieve this with strong frontlist sales and by working “more closely and more efficiently on performance, especially on pricing, on purchasing and also on the volume of books we are going to produce”.
She explained that “in the last two years we have made a significant effort to increase our prices whether it is in the UK, the US but also in France”, revealing the company increased prices by 6% in France last year “which enabled us to offset significant parts of the inflation in costs and especially in paper and in freight”. She said this year Lagardère “will continue to increase price, but probably more selectively and with a more data-driven approach that we will roll out in all countries”.
On distribution, she confirmed the company had decided to stop the Polaris distribution programme in France “in its current form”. Design began in 2021 but “after two to three years of design and measuring the project we realised it was probably too big and too expensive for what we needed”. She stressed that “doesn’t mean that we will stop our thinking on distribution”.
Arnaud Lagardère concluded: “We strongly believe in publishing for the years to come. The same reason, we believed in it when we invested in this market when nobody believed in it at that time 10 to 15 years ago. And we have some ideas of organic growth. We have some ideas of acquisitions also and we’re entering a very offensive strategy in terms of cost cutting.”
