ePals Corporation is to acquire Carus Publishing Company in a combined cash and stock transaction. Carus Publishing Company includes the Cricket Magazine Group, Cobblestone Publishing and Open Court Publishing. Carus also publishes 14 magazine titles on a variety of subjects (fiction, science, history, culture), hundreds of books and a collection of Web and mobile applications.
The acquisition of Carus accelerates ePals’ entrance into the home subscription market by adding Carus’ subscriber base of more than 300,000 grandparents, parents and extended family members, as well as a broad array of publications for children across a variety of subjects.
Carus Publishing Company, The acquisition will add to ePals:
- significant gross revenue which in 2010 was approximately US$16 million with EBITDA of nearly US$1 million and a net loss of approximately US$270,000;
- more than 300,000 consumer subscriptions (approximately 70% from grandparents) and approximately 80,000 institutional subscriptions;
- customer relationships with an estimated 30% of US middle schools and 3800 libraries;
- a recipient of 65 Parents’ Choice awards and more than half of all International Reading Association, Paul A. Witty awards ever given;
- mobile applications, including Carus’ Ladybug App; and
- a licensing business in China for three localised Chinese publications based on Carus content.
“Since public listing four months ago, we have focused on launching LearningSpace 2.0 to enable schools to build safe learning communities as part of their K-12 cloud solutions, announced integration of Microsoft Office365 and GoogleDocs into our learning communities so that teachers can let their students use state of the art tools in a safe and secure manner, and launched major initiatives to establish ePals China and ePals Europe,” said Miles Gilburne, Chairman and CEO of ePals.
USA, Washington, DC & Chicago, IL
Fusion Corporate Partners 