Encyclopedia Britannica plots $1bn stock market listing
Encyclopædia Britannica is preparing to join the US stock market with a hoped-for $1bn (£850m) valuation.
The publisher behind the centuries-old encyclopædia is in talks about a market debut that could come as soon as June, according to Bloomberg.
The company, which is known for publishing the oldest English-language general encyclopaedia, is working with advisors over the initial public offering and is seeking a valuation of $1bn. It has been owned by Swiss financier Jacob E Safra since 1996 and filed confidentially for an initial public offering earlier this year.
The move to go public would mark a watershed moment for the business, which was first published in Edinburgh in 1768.
The reference book was created as a dictionary of arts and science, including entries on countries, geographies and cities.
An advertisement for the first instalment in late December 1768 said the book would include “accurate definitions and explanations of all the terms as they occur in the order of the alphabet”, such as anatomy, smoke and money.
The first edition of the work comprised three volumes and was sold by subscription over three years.
As an attempt to map the sum of human knowledge, the publication is considered to be one of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment. In the decades that followed the first edition, more than 7 million sets of the Encyclopædia Britannica were printed, including a record 120,000 sets in 1990.
However, the publication faced increased competition from the internet, which made knowledge far more easily accessible than it had been. Wikipedia, a free, crowd sourced rival to the Encyclopedia Britannica, was launched in 2001.
By 2012, Encyclopedia Britannica took the decision to stop publishing the 32-volume print edition, saying it needed to “diversify and digitise”. It now exists online as Britannica.com, attracting 7 billion page views each year.
The company makes revenues from digital advertising and online subscriptions to access more of the website including games. Revenues also come from its online learning tools and a natural language processing platform.
The company, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc, is today based in Chicago and publishes other well-known reference books including the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
In 2022, the company said it was making around $100m in annual revenues. It has been linked to a potential IPO for the past two years.
The public debut is expected to land Mr Safra a major pay-day. The investor is part of the billionaire Safra banking family and famously funded a series of Woody Allen films. It resulted in a legal battle over the profits made from the films, with Mr Allen claiming he was owed $14m. The case was settled in 2002.
Britannica did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
