Big Deals Highlighted 2021 Acquisitions

"Even as Penguin Random House fights with the Department of Justice to win approval for its $2.18 billion purchase of Simon & Schuster, the consolidation beat in publishing continued in 2021 with the consummation of some of the biggest deals in several years. The biggest acquisition came in the information and library publishing market, where London-based Clarivate bought ProQuest for $5.3 billion. (The deal did not included Bowker, which remains part of Cambridge, a separate unit of ProQuest.) The combined company has over 11,000 employees, with 45,000 customers in over 200 countries, and Clarivate’s 2022 revenue is projected to be between $2.87 billion and $2.93 billion. The deal was opposed by the advocacy group SPARC, which represents more than 240 academic and research library members, who said the combination “pushes this market to the brink of a monopoly.” The second billion-dollar deal was Platinum Equity’s $4.5 billion purchase of McGraw Hill, a purchase that came eight years after Apollo Global Management acquired MH for $2.4 billion. The acquisition also took place about one year after a proposed merger between MH and Cengage fell through after running into opposition from the Justice Department...."