Future has announced the acquisition of Dennis Publishing, a deal which includes titles like The Week, The Week US, and IT Pro. Future is acquiring the titles for £300 million.
Dennis was bought by private equity group Exponent in 2018 for an undisclosed sum. While Future is buying the majority of Dennis’s titles, it will not acquire satirical magazine Viz, or Fortean Times, a magazine dedicated to anomalous phenomena. Neither will it acquire Expert Reviews or Cyclist.
Future is a self-proclaimed “platform for specialist media”, and so titles like Money Week and Minecraft World fit well within its portfolio. With the acquisition of titles like The Week US and Kiplinger, the move is also an attempt by Future to expand its reach in North America.
This is the third major acquisition this year for Future. In February it bought GoCo group, owner of insurance comparison website GoCompare. And in May this year Future, which already owned Marie Claire UK, bought Marie Claire US from Hearst. Future’s CEO Zillah Byng-Thorne emphasised the group’s strategy to build on their US presence with the acquisitions.
“The materially earnings enhancing acquisition is highly complementary to our longstanding ‘US first’ mindset and provides an attractive opportunity to scale our recently created ‘Wealth’ vertical, whilst diversifying our presence in our ‘Knowledge’ and ‘B2B Pro Technology’ verticals,” Byng-Thorne said.
Despite the pressures facing traditional publishing, Future’s model has weathered the storm and proven financially successful. Future says that over the last five years, it has acquired assets worth £1.1 billion and increased its underlying business by more than £2 billion. Since the beginning of the year, Future’s share prices have more than doubled. On 4 January 2021, the share price was at 1,802.00 GBX, as of 11:00 GMT today it was at 3,917.12 GBX.
In April of this year, Zack Sullivan, chief revenue officer at Future spoke on the VideoWeek podcast about how the company has grown over the past few years, and why Future regards themselves as part publishing platform, part creative agency. You can listen to the episode here.
The full list of Dennis titles that Future has acquired are, The Week / The Week US, The Week Junior / The Week Junior US, Money Week, Kiplinger, Science & Nature, IT Pro, Computer Active, PC Pro, Minecraft World and Coach.
