Orell Füssli AG: Orell Füssli Group completes transformation of publishing houses
Zurich, December 16, 2020 - Orell Füssli successfully completes the implementation of the transformation program of the publishing houses and will in future focus on educational and legal media and on the well-known children's book brands Globi and Carigiet for children of primary school age.
The transformation of the Orell Füssli publishing companies initiated in 2019 was successfully completed as planned by the end of the year. In future, Orell Füssli Publishing will focus its orientation on the education sector and concentrate its offering on learning media and specialist legal media for the Swiss market. The publishing house has a strong and established programme in this area and sees attractive potential for the further development of the business unit and the expansion of its market position. To this end, the programmatic orientation and digitalization of the range of products in the area of learning media will be pushed forward more intensively. The children's book brands Globi and Carigiet, with their knowledge-enhancing book series such as "Globi lernt" or "Technik mit Globi" and their focus on the Swiss market, fit very well with the new orientation and will remain with the Orell Füssli publishing houses.
As part of this focus, the Atlantis publishing house for children's books is sold to the Zurich-based Kampa publishing, which will continue Atlantis as an independent programme and with the existing management. A sustainable new owner has been found for Atlantis in the form of the Kampa publishing, which has acquired a high reputation in the publishing industry in a very short time, and will ensure the continuation of a sustainable strategy for high-quality children's books. The publishing house employees as well as the authors of Atlantis will be taken over by Kampa publishing. In the Orell Füssli children's book series as well as in the non-fiction book series, both of which were no longer profitable in recent years, the existing programme will remain available, but no new books will be published from 2021 onwards. These measures resulted in the dismissal of one part-time employee and an early retirement. Socially acceptable solutions were found with the employees concerned.
By concentrating on learning and educational media as well as the classics of Globi and Carigiet for children of primary school age, the sale of Atlantis publishing and the discontinuation of Orell Füssli’s own children's and non-fiction book series, the Orell Füssli Group is following the strategy presented in spring 2020 focusing on security and education.