Boston book publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has filed for an initial public offering of stock that analysts say could raise $250 million, a sign that the company’s prospects are improving one year after it emerged from bankruptcy.
Chief executive Linda K. Zecher has talked openly about taking the publisher public since last summer, when creditors agreed to exchange $3.1 billion of debt for stakes in the company. An IPO could help the lenders begin to recoup their investments....
The 181-year-old company has been in tumult for more than a decade, changing ownership frequently and racking up debt.
In one transaction, former Irish investment banker Barry O’Callaghan bought Houghton Mifflin in 2006 from private equity firms Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners of Boston, and the Blackstone Group of New York. O’Callaghan borrowed heavily to finance the purchase, then borrowed more to buy Harcourt Education a year later, creating the company now known as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The purchases cost a combined $7.4 billion.
Since then, the company has struggled to pay its debt, as state and local budget cuts that followed the recession sliced spending on education materials. In 2011, the year before Houghton filed for bankruptcy....
Houghton’s properties include some signature franchises, including “The Lord of the Rings,” “Curious George,” “Cliffs Notes,” and “Webster’s New World Dictionary.”
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"Indeed, all the big educational publishers are increasingly acting like technology companies in the race to replace printed books in the classroom, said Bill Rust, an analyst at Gartner Inc., a research firm."
