ProQuest Makes Two Niche Deals
by Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 1/6/2003
ProQuest Company has made two niche acquisitions over the last several weeks. In early December, the company reached an agreement to take full control of bigchalk.com Inc. and last last month it acquired the custom-publishing assets from Courier Corp.
In the bigchalk deal, ProQuest signed a letter of intent to acquire the shares of the company that it does not already own. ProQuest founded bigchalk in the late 1990s, and spun it off in 1999 with the intention of taking the company—which is an online provider of materials for the k–12 market—public. But when the Internet market collapsed, ProQuest retained a 38% share in the company and sold the remaining stake to venture capitalists. By buying out the other stakeholders, ProQuest will be better able to integrate bigchalk into its existing operations, a spokesperson said.
The acquisition of Courier's custom-publishing assets will increase ProQuest's presence in one of its major market areas, the production of college coursepacks. ProQuest paid $1.5 million for the assets, which include multipublisher coursepacks and out-of-print book reproductions. As a division of Courier, the custom-publishing group generated revenue of $1.2 million in the fiscal year ended September 28, 2002, and had a loss of $191,000. Courier will use the proceeds from the sale to expand its Dover Publications subsidiary.
