Reed Elsevier

From Eureka

Reed Elsevier is a multimedia conglomerate which focuses on four core markets:

Science & Medical
Legal
Education
Business

In February 2007, Reed Elsevier reported revenues for 2006 of just over €7 billion. Reed Elsevier's main activities are in North America and Europe, and the company employs approximately 36,500 people in over 200 locations.

Reed Elsevier is technically called the 'Reed Elsevier Group plc'. It is owned equally by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV.

A subsidiary of Reed Elsevier, Spearhead, organizes defence shows, including a recent event where it was reported that cluster bombs and extremely powerful riot control equipment were offered for sale.

In 2002, Forbes magazine wrote:

If you are not a scientist or a lawyer, you might never guess which company is one of the world's biggest in online revenue. Ebay will haul in only $1 billion this year. Amazon has $3.5 billion in revenue but is still, famously, losing money. Outperforming them both is Reed Elsevier, the London-based publishing company. Of its $8 billion in likely sales this year, $1.5 billion will come from online delivery of data, and its operating margin on the internet is a fabulous 22%.

Credit this accomplishment to two things. One is that Reed primarily sells not advertising or entertainment but the dry data used by lawyers, doctors, nurses, scientists and teachers. The other is its newfound marketing hustle: Its CEO since 1999 has been Crispin Davis, formerly a soap salesman.

But Davis will have to keep hustling to stay out of trouble. Reed Elsevier has fat margins and high prices in a business based on information - a commodity, and one that is cheaper than ever in the internet era. New technologies and increasingly universal access to free information make it vulnerable to attack from below. Today pirated music downloaded from the web ravages corporate profits in the music industry. Tomorrow could be the publishing industry's turn.

Some customers accuse Reed Elsevier of price gouging. Daniel DeVito, a patent lawyer with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, is a fan of Reed's legal-search service, but he himself does free science searches on the Google site before paying for something like Reed's ScienceDirect - and often finds what he's looking for at no cost. Reed can ill afford to rest.

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