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Why Keeping It In The Family Is Not Working For BertelsmannPosted at 7:59AM Thursday 20 Mar 2008 Not having a share price to defend is one of life's luxuries, and not going public is a subject over which the Mohns obsess, having spent £3.1 billion to buy out a minority shareholder two years ago to prevent a float. In a week when Bear Stearns turned out to be worth $2 a share and when even Johnston Press's Blackpool Gazette gets up in the storm, that probably feels like a good place to be. At least it is until you look at Bertelsmann's results, released this week.Of its six divisions, four failed to register growth last year, so the overall improvement was a lousy 0.4 per cent. Random House, the normally reliable book publisher, managed to make Pearson's Penguin look good, as it blamed a downturn in the American economy for restrained book-buying, but Gruner + Jahr cannot make headway in magazines, even though it is trying to expand globally.
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