The Dutch company Swets & Zeitlinger Group has filed for
bankruptcy due to insolvency, but the court has granted the company deferment
of payments to creditors, mainly publishers. Main activity of this company was mainly
broking subscriptions between publishers and libraries for professional use such
universities and professional institutes. Swets & Zeitlinger Group have two
months to find a solution and new financers.
The Group is the mother company to Royal Swets &
Zeitlinger Holding. This holding with a slew of subsidiaries is worldwide
market leader in subscription services to academic and professional libraries in
160 countries. It has offices in 27 countries and employs 541 FTE. It has more
than 8,000 customers worldwide, representing more than 800,000 subscriptions to
its offerings.
Adriaan Swets and
Heinrich Zeitlinger started in 1901 a
bookshop in Amsterdam, named Swets & Zeitlinger. From this Amsterdam
base it grew into an international publishing company, adding amongst others library
services. By 2003 it sold the publishing division, which published amongst
others test material, and focussed on library services. Royal Swets & Zeitlinger offers subscription services
for 35.000 publishers to universities and institutional libraries. Half
of the turn-over comes from the 10 largest publishers such as Elsevier and
Springer. But as universities and institutional libraries are still in the
process of changing over from subscriptions for paper publications to digital
publications. Commissions on digital
products are lower than print subscriptions with the average gross profit
margin for print subscriptions at 10.5 per cent to digital at an average gross
margin of 4.4 per cent. Digital formats have also facilitated large publishers
to establish direct customer relationships, resulting in partial customer
losses. These developments combined with the economic crises have hit Royal Swets hard. Last year the
company lost 1,9 million euro on a turn-over of 550 million euro. A banking consortium and the financer ICG are set to loose 72 million euro.
At the beginning of the year the shareholders of the company
put the company up for sale, as it needed more capital to go through a
transformation and scaling up. This sale was said to be expected in the third
quarter. But now Royal Swets has been overtaken by financial problems and has
shareholders not willing to jump in. Royal Swets has now two months to find a
new shareholders, to merge or be acquired or to sell the slew of companies separately.
Elsevier and Springer have informed their clients to be
careful with payments as they might loose their payments in a bankruptcy.
EBSCO, Swets
competitor in the global arena, has reacted to the problems of Swets. The
company praises Swets as an honorable and professional organization with many
astute and gifted personnel.
But it hopes to be a landing place for some of the personnel who
will be out of work and is ready to help customers to avoid disruption in
service. In the reaction EBSCO assures the publishers and clients that EBSCO
continues to be financially very strong, having the highest possible rating by credit
rating company Dun and Bradstreet.
