Taylor & Francis, which bought CRC Press in March, continues to expand its presence in the U.S., reaching an agreement last week to acquire the Dekker Group for $138.6 million. Headquartered in New York, Dekker is an STM publisher of books and journals with an emphasis in science, engineering and medicine. The company had 2002 revenue of $42 million, making the purchase a healthy 3.2 times annual sales. Dekker had a pretax profit of $3.2 million last year.
Dekker publishes 78 journals and 200 new books annually and has a backlist of 3,000 titles. Its journal division generated revenue of $24.9 million last year, while the book group had sales of $17.1 million. The company has 170 employees. T&F chief executive David Smith acknowledged that the professional publishing segment in the U.S. is at present "challenging" but, he said, it was "a good opportunity" to extend T&F's reach in the world's largest STM market.
T&F has spent $273.7 million—including $95 million for CRC—to acquire five companies this year. Only weeks before buying Dekker, T&F acquired the Dutch publisher Swets & Zeitlinger for about $20 million. With its new additions, T&F will publish 1,000 journals in 2004 as well as 2,000 new books. It will have a backlist of 30,000 titles.
