COURSEWORK

Coursework for Financial Reporting



Coursework for Financial Reporting

Introduction to Company

Reed Elsevier operates as a publishing and information providing company engaged in providing its services to science, medical, legal, risk and business sector. Its name is counted amongst FT Global 500 companies and FTSE 100. There are two companies listed under this brand name i.e. Reef Elsevier Plc. And Reed Elsevier NV. The company began its operations in 1992 as an outcome of a merger (Reed Elsevier, 2013, n.d.).

Business Operations

It sold its education publishing unit in 2007 to Harcourt, which was purchased by Pearson the internationally recognized education and information company. This transaction was worth $950 million. The rest of the business unit was sold to Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group worth $4 billion in form of cash and stocks. The company declared its willingness to sell majority of portion of North American business in 2009. In the same year, company's IT infrastructure and unit began to be outsourced from Indian company HCL. The company sold 44 magazines in 2010. The company bought Accuity Holdings Inc., a US online data firm from Investcorp of £343 million (Annual Report, 2011, n.d.).

There are five main divisions of the company namely science and medical publication under Elsevier, Risk unit under LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Legal unit under LexisNexis Legal & Professional, Exhibition unit under Reed Exhibitions, and Business unit under Reed Business Information. Its main products include ScienceDirect, which includes publications on science, technology and medicine related topics. Scopus includes a broad collection of database on citation and web sources for purpose of research. Business related publications include data and related information in the field of business. The company is mostly criticized with respect to charging higher process for its publications and delivery services. In this regard, a movement has been initiated by members of scientific communities.

The main competitors of the company include Random House Inc, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, Gannett Co., Inc. and many more.

Overview of Industry

The publication industry of UK has been one of the most successful industries over time. It is regarded as one of the largest industries in the world and it is highly known for its quality and creativity in terms of content and wide variety of topics covered in various subjects. Its turnover for the year 2011 has been £20 billion and comprised of 8500 companies, which is run by around 160000 workers. This industry has bee regarded as the most developed industry. It is capable of publishing more than 100,000 publications in a year and publishes magazines and newspaper as well. It covers diversified topics and cultures such as the most famous Harry Porter novels, the teddy bear Times magazines. It is considered as one of the largest exporter and re-exporter of books in terms of value as majority of the revenue is generated from export sales, and it is estimated to be more than £1 billion per year in 2011. As per research, 13% of Magazines in UK possess international dissemination ...