Weltbild to remain church-owned

Germany’s Catholic Church has taken Weltbild—one of the largest publishing groups and booksellers in the country—off the market after no suitable buyer emerged in seven months.

Instead, the bishops of the 12 dioceses who own the company have decided to transfer their shares to a new statutory trust “based on non-profit, cultural and Christian principles”, which will be the sole shareholder. Further details have not yet been announced.

The alliance between the Church and its worldly offshoot had been an uneasy one for some years, but things came to a head in the autumn following a report in the German trade paper Buchreport that Weltbild’s catalogue included a number of erotic titles with potentially pornographic content.

Weltbild was founded in 1948 as a publisher of Catholic magazines, and has grown into a media company with annual sales of €1.66bn (£1.34bn) in the year ending June 2011. The driving force behind the success story is Carel Halff, the Dutch-born manager who joined Weltbild in 1975. Halff was appointed chief executive in 2001, and will stay on once the new structure is implemented.

Under his leadership Weltbild has become a leading force in the German book industry with major interests in publishing (apart from its own Weltbild Verlag, the Augsburg-based company jointly owns trade publisher Droemer Knaur with Verlagsgruppe von Holtzbrinck), mail order and bookselling. The latter was consolidated a few years ago under the roof of DBH, the holding that Weltbild owns together with the Hugendubel family. DBH is Germany’s second-largest bookseller, with annual sales of €720m (£580m). It operates around 450 branches under the brands Hugendubel, Wohlthat, Jokers and Weltbild.

Weltbild was among the first German retailers to fully embrace e-commerce. In fiscal 2010/11, online sales grew by 21% to more than €550m (£443m). In September 2011 it introduced its own eBook Reader 3.0, retailing at €59.99. A few weeks later Weltbild and Hugendubel presented their own tablet with Android 2.3 that sells for €159.99.

www.thebookseller.com/weltbild