For almost 250 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a bookshelf-busting sequence of gilt-lettered tomes, typically bought to point out that its homeowners cared about information.
It was the type of bodily media anticipated to die within the web period, and certainly, the encyclopedia’s writer introduced that it was ending the print version in 2012. Skeptics questioned how Britannica the corporate may survive within the age of Wikipedia.
The reply was to adapt to the occasions.
Britannica Group, as the corporate is now identified, runs web sites, together with Britannica.com and the net Merriam-Webster dictionary, and sells academic software program to varsities and libraries. It additionally sells synthetic intelligence agent software program that underpins functions like customer support chatbots and information retrieval.
Britannica has discovered not solely the right way to survive, but in addition the right way to do properly financially. Jorge Cauz, its chief government, mentioned in an interview that the writer loved professional forma revenue margins of about 45 p.c.
The corporate is weighing an initial public offering, during which it may search a valuation of about $1 billion, in response to an individual with information of the deliberations who was not licensed to talk publicly.
That would present a large return for the corporate’s proprietor, the Swiss financier Jacob E. Safra, who acquired the writer in 1995 and, in a lawsuit filed in 2022, cited an funding financial institution in valuing Britannica at $500 million.
