What is Grupo Macmillan?
Grupo Macmillan comprises a number of publishing companies belonging to Macmillan Publishers which operate out of their own offices located in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries in Latin America and Europe. Macmillan Publishers, founded in 1843 in London, is one of the world’s largest and most renowed international publishers. It forms part of the Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a German media group which operates in more than 80 countries.
Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck
The mission of the Holtzbrinck Group is to produce and disseminate knowledge.
The Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, which operates in more than 80 countries and employs over 12,000 people, was established in 1971. Its origins lie in Stuttgarter Hausbucherei, a library founded by Georg von Holtzbrinck in 1948 in Stuttgart, Germany. The Hausbucherai gradually evolved into the Deutsche Bucherbund book club and was the group's largest company until the mid-1980s.
By that time, the Holtzbrinck Group already owned some of Germany’s most important publishing houses, newspapers, and magazines, including the German publishing houses, Rowohlt and Fischer, the newspapers, Handelsblatt and Die Zeit, and the magazine, Wirtschafts Woche.
In that same decade, Holtzbrinck started to grow in the US, acquiring the Scientific American, Bedford Freeman and Worth, Henry Holt, and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux publishing houses.
The Group’s expansion into English-language markets culminated in 1995 with the acquisition of a majority stake in Macmillan, a company which it now wholly owns. Macmillan accounts for nearly 50% of total Group sales for Holtzbrinck and it has increased the Group’s international focus, especially in markets in Latin America, India, China, Japan and Africa.
Acquisition of Macmillan strengthened the Holtzbrinck Group’s presence in the US through integration of St. Martin's Press, a leading company in the areas of general interest books and university textbooks.
The Holtzbrinck Group’s approach is based on quality and decentralization through the development of publications which meet the requirements of each individual country.
The Group’s activities cover four key areas:
- Education and science
- Fiction and non-fiction
- Newspapers, and business and finance information
- Electronic media and services
Nobel Prize winners whose books have been published by companies in the Holtzbrinck Group include: Heinrich Böll, J.M. Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Imre Kertész, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, Kenzaburo Oe, José Saramago and Derek Walcott.
