St Ives agrees to sale of magazine division

A MAGAZINE printing business with clients including Time Out, Vogue and The Economist is to be sold to the owner of rival Wyndeham Press for £20m.

St Ives has agreed the sale of its loss-making magazine division, which also prints Look, Sainsbury’s Magazine, music magazine NME and lifestyle publication Wallpaper, to Wyndeham’s private equity owner Walstead Investments.

Walstead was set up in 2008 to buy Wyndeham, which prints magazines including Marie Claire, Waitrose Food Illustrated and Zoo.

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St Ives also prints books in the Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia series and will still own the magazine printing plants in Peterborough, Plymouth and Roche in Cornwall, which it will lease to the new owners.

The magazine business, which employs 670 people, made a loss before tax of £5.1m in the year to July after facing price pressure as readers migrate to the inter- net.

Shares in St Ives were up 9 per cent after the management said the deal would allow it to strengthen its balance sheet and further diversify into other higher profit areas, such as marketing and logistics.

The magazine arm’s corporate clients feature some of the UK’s biggest publishers of magazines, including Tatler publisher Conde Nast, IPC Media and Haymar- ket.

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St Ives has also published books including Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, Driven to Distraction by Jeremy Clarkson, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.

Mike Murphy, an analyst at Numis Securities, said the sale of the magazine printing arm would represent a giant leap forward for St Ives.

He upgraded earnings per share forecasts for 2012 by 14 per cent because he expects the sale to rid the group of £3m a year of trading losses.

The acquisition is subject to approval by St Ives’ sharehold- ers.

The company is due to announce its interim results later today.